Bektis looked down his long nose at this grimy upstart outlander who, he had been informed, had presumed to show signs of being mageborn. “Perhaps,” he said loftily, “were we presently in any danger from the Dark. Yet it has been noted that no alarm of their presence has occurred since we reached the high ground … “
“Oh, come on! You saw how well that high ground stuff worked at Karst!”
” … and,” the sorcerer grated, with an edge to his high, rather light voice, “I have seen in an enchanted crystal the only Nest of the Dark known in these mountains, and I assure you that it is blocked, as it has been blocked for centuries. Naturally my lady may do as she pleases, but for reasons of her own comfort and health, and on account of her state and prestige, I doubt that my lord Alwir will permit my lady to walk in the back of the train like a common peasant woman.” Turning on his heel, the old man stalked back toward his wagon, his fur cape swirling behind him like a thundercloud.
Minalde sat in unhappy silence for a time, rocking her child against her breast as if to protect him from unseen peril. Distantly, the sounds of the camp’s breaking came to them, the braying of mules and the creak of harnesses, the splash and hiss of doused fires. Somewhere quite close, voices raised in anger, Alwir’s controlled and cutting as a lash, and after, the dry, vituperative hiss of Bishop Govannin’s.
Alde sighed. “They’re at it again.” She kissed Tir’s round little forehead, following up the mark of affection with a businesslike check of the state of his diaper, and proceeded to tuck him up in his multiple blankets again; the morning seemed to be growing colder instead of warmer. “They say we should reach the Keep tonight,” she went on in a low voice, excluding from hearing any but the man who stood beside her in the shadows of the wagon. “Sometimes it has seemed that we’d travel forever and never reach the place. So Bektis is probably right.”
Rudy leaned his elbow on the wagon-tail. “You think so?”
She didn’t reply. Beyond, there was the clatter of trace-chains and the sound of troopers talking casually among themselves as they harnessed the oxen. “Will we reach the Keep in daylight, or will we have to push on after sundown?”
Her hands paused in their restless readying of the wagon for travel. In a low voice she said, “After sundown, I think.”
Ingold slumped back exhaustedly against a boulder and rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees. “I am very much afraid, my dear,” he said tiredly, “that we are not going to make it.”
Gil, who for the last several hours had been aware of very little beyond the form of the wizard, who had always seemed to be walking farther and farther ahead of her, could only nod. The little bay among the rocks above the road where they had taken shelter offered no protection from the increasing cold, but at least they were out of the wind. They had fought the wind all day, and, like a wolf, it had torn at their cloaks and mauled their exposed faces with savage violence. Gil could sense on it now the smell of the storm moving down from the glaciers on the high peaks. Even in this comparative shelter, hard bits of mealy snow had begun to fly. It was now late afternoon; there was no chance, she knew, of reaching the Arrow Gorge before the convoy did. Whatever the Dark Ones had done to the bridge there, it was beyond her power or Ingold’s to warn the people of it.
After a little time she recovered enough to disengage the flask she wore at her belt, draw the stopper, and take a tentative sip—the stuff made white lightning taste like lemonade. “The captain at the Keep gave me this,” she explained, passing it over.
He took a drink without turning a hair. “I knew there was an ultimate reason in the cosmic scheme of things for you to accompany me,” he said, and smiled through the ice in his beard. “Now that makes twice you’ve saved my life.”
Over their heads in the rocks, the roaring of the wind increased to a kind of cold, keening shriek, and a great gust of snow blew down on them. Gil drew herself closer to Ingold’s side. “About how far above the Arrow are we now?”
“Two or three miles. We would be able to see it, but for the winding of the road. That’s what worries me, Gil; if they had passed the bridge in safety, we would have met them before this.”
“Might the storm have slowed them down?”
“Possibly, But it won’t really hit until about sundown. It would be suicide for them to stop now.”
“Can’t you do anything about the storm?” she asked him suddenly. “Didn’t you say once that wizards can call and dismiss storms?”
He nodded. “And so we can,” he replied, “if that is what we wish to do.” As he spoke she noticed that, instead of gloves, he was wearing mittens—old and frayed now, like everything about him, but, by the intricacy of their design, clearly knitted for him by someone who cared very much for the old man. “We can send storms elsewhere, or call them to serve us—all except the ice storms of the plains, which strike without warning and make this—” He gestured at the whirling snow flurries. “—resemble a balmy spring breeze. But I think I pointed out to Rudy once, and I may have mentioned to you as well, that the Dark will not attack under a storm. So it may be that in doing nothing about the storm, we will be choosing the lesser of two evils.”
He rose to go, wrapping his muffler tighter around his neck and drawing his hood down to protect his face. He was helping Gil to her feet when they heard on the road below them the muffled clop of hooves and the jingling of bits, echoes thrown into the sheltered pocket of boulders and dried grass that a moment ago had hidden all sound of the troop’s coming. Beyond the boulders, Gil saw them come into view, a weary straggle of refugees. She recognized, in the lead, the big, scarred man on a brown horse whose head drooped with exhaustion. She and Ingold exchanged one quick, startled glance. Then the wizard was off, scrambling down the rocks to the road, calling, “Tirkenson! Tomec Tirkenson!” The landchief straightened in his saddle and threw out his hand as a signal to halt
Gil followed Ingold with more haste than seemliness down to the road. The landchief of Gettlesand towered over them in the leaden twilight, looking like a big, gaunt bandit at the head of his ragged troop of retainers. Glancing down the road, Gil could see that his followers—a great gaggle of families, a substantial herd of bony sheep and cattle, a gang of tough-looking hard-cases riding pointguard—were hardly a sixth of the main convoy.
“Ingold,” the landchief greeted them. He had a voice like a rock slide in a gravel pit and a face to match. “We were wondering if we’d run into you, Gilshalos,” he greeted her with a nod.
“Where did you leave the rest of the convoy?”
Tirkenson grunted angrily, his light, saddle-colored eyes turning harsh. “Down by the bridge,” he grumbled. “They’re making camp, like fools.”
“Making camp?” The wizard was aghast “That’s madness!”
“Yes, well, who said they were sane?” the landchief growled. “I told them, get the people across and to hell with the wagons and the luggage, we can send back for that … “
Ingold’s voice was suddenly quiet. “What happened?”
“Holy Hell, Ingold.” The landchief rubbed a big hand over his face wearily. “What hasn’t happened? The bridge came down. The main pylons went under the weight of those carts of Alwir’s, took the whole kit and caboodle down with them—”
“And the Queen?”
“No.” Tirkenson frowned, puzzling over it “She was afoot, for some reason, up at the head of the train. Walking with the Prince slung on her back, like any other woman. I don’t know why—but I do know if she’d been in a cart, there would’ve been no saving her. So what’s Alwir do but start salvaging operations, hauling the stuff up out of the gorge, and rigging rope pontoons across the river down below. Then the Bishop says she won’t abandon her wagons, and they start breaking them down to carry them across in pieces, and half the people are cut off on one side of the river and half on the other, and squabbling about getting baggage and animals across, and before you know it, everybody’s saying they’ll settle there for the night. I tried to tell them they’d be froze blue by morning, sure as the ice comes in the north, but that pet conjurer of Alwir’s, that Bektis, says he can hold off the storm, and by the time Alwir and the Bishop got done slanging one another, they said it was too late to go on anyway. So there they sit.” He gestured disgustedly and leaned back into the cantle of his saddle.