“Who else can go?” Ingold reasoned. “And if I were afraid of getting myself killed, I should never have taken up this business in the first place. I should have stayed in Gettlesand and grown roses and cast horoscopes. No—all that I can do now is stay a few steps ahead of them and hope that I realize what the answer is before they catch me.”
“You’re crazy,” Rudy stated unequivocally.
Ingold smiled. “Really, Rudy, I thought we’d long settled the question of my sanity.”
“You’re all crazy!” Rudy insisted. “You and Gil and Alde and the Guards … How the hell come I always end up completely surrounded by lunatics?”
The old man settled comfortably back among the blankets and picked up his tea again, the steam wreathing his face like smoke from the altar of a battered idol. “The question is the answer, Rudy—always provided you want an answer that badly.”
Considering it in that light, Rudy was not entirely sure that he did.
Alde was waiting for him in the outer room. Most of the Guards had gone. Beyond the black, narrow arch of the doorway, Janus’ voice could be heard in the next room, still arguing with the same merchants. In a corner, the Icefalcon had fallen asleep, relaxed and self-absorbed as a cat. But for him, they were alone.
“Alde … ” Rudy began, and she stood up from the bunk where she had been sitting and put a finger to his lips.
“I heard,” she said softly.
“Listen … ” he tried to explain.
Again she shushed him. “Of course you should go with him.” Her fingers closed, cool and light, over his. “Was there any question of your not going?”
He laughed softly, remembering his own apprehensions. “I guess—not to me. But I sure didn’t think you’d understand.” They stood together, as close as they had on the road when they’d been accustomed to share a cloak on watch at night. The ebbing yellow glow of the fire masked them in dun, pulsing shadow, and he could smell the sweetgrass braided into her hair. “I didn’t think anybody would understand or could understand. Because I sure as hell don’t.”
She chuckled with soft laughter. “He’s your master, Rudy,” she said. “And your need is to learn. Even if I wanted to, I could never stop you from it.” But she moved closer to him in the shadows, belying her own words.
We all have our priorities, Rudy thought, and brushed aside the dark silk of her hair to kiss her lips. If It came to a choice between me and Tir, I know damn well who’d get left out in the cold. She, too, had her choices between loves.
The embers in the hearth whispered a little and collapsed in on themselves, sending up a spurt of yellow flame and almost immediately cloaking them both in deeper shadow. From outside the room, the constant murmur of voices from the hall beyond came to them like the mingling of a stream. Rudy was finding already that he had grown used to the Keep, the noises, the shadows, the smells. He could feel the weight of that mountain of stone pressing down around them, as it had pressed for thousands of years. But as he kissed her again, holding her slenderness tight against him, he reflected that there was a great deal to be said for stillness and silence and love without fear.
Her breath a whisper against his lips, she murmured, “I understand, Rudy—but I will miss you,”
His arm tightened convulsively about her shoulders. Scraps of conversations drifted back to his memory, things said in Karst and in the night camps all down that perilous road. She had lost the world she had known and everyone in it she had loved, except her son. And now he, Rudy, was leaving her, too. Yet she hadn’t said, Don’t go.
What kind of love, he wondered, understood that need and tried to make easier the separation it would cause?
None that he’d ever run into.
Alde, you’re a lady in a million. I wish to hell you weren’t the Queen. I almost wish I weren’t going back, or that I could take you and Tir back with me when I go.
But either course was impossible.
As she slipped away from him, gathering her cloak about her shoulders as she vanished through the darkness of the far doorway, it occurred to him that she hadn’t even asked him that other thing—Will you miss me, too?
Against the blurred gleam that backed the grimy door curtain, Gil watched the shadows of man and woman embrace, meld, and separate. In the stillness of the room, she heard Ingold sigh. “Poor child,” he said softly. “Poor child.”
She glanced across at him, invisible but for the glitter of his eyes In the darkness and his bandaged hands folded on his breast. “Ingold?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Do you really believe there’s no such thing as coincidence?”
The question didn’t seem to surprise him, but then, few things did. Gil had known people—her mother, for one—who would have replied, “What a question to ask at a time like this!” But it was a question that could be asked only at such times, when all the daylight trivialities had been put aside, and there was only the understanding of people who knew one another well.
Ingold gave it some thought, and said at last, “Yes. I believe that nothing happens randomly, that there is no such thing as chance. How could there be?” There was a faint squeaking rustle as he settled himself back against the sacks of fodder. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, ” Gil said uncertainly. “I think I understand that Rudy came here to—to be a wizard, to find that for himself—because he was born one. But I wasn’t. And if there are no such things as random events, why am I here? Why me and not somebody else? Why was I taken away, why did I lose everything I had—scholarship and friends and—and life, really, the life I had? I don’t understand.”
Ingold’s voice was grave in the darkness, and she saw the faint touch of light on his cheekbone as he turned his head. “You once accused me of dealing, mage-like, in double talk. But truly, Gil, I do not know. I do not understand any more than you do. But I believe there is a purpose to your being here. Believe me, Gil. Please believe me.”
She shrugged, embarrassed as she always was by anyone’s concern. “It’s not important,” she lied, and she knew Ingold heard the lie. “You know, I resented it like hell when you told me Rudy would be a wizard. Not because I wanted to be one, but—it’s as if he’s gained everything and lost nothing, because he really had nothing that he cared about to lose. But I lost everything … ” She broke off, the silence coming between them like the ocean between a swimmer and the shore.
“And gained nothing?” To that she could not reply. “It may be that it is not Rudy’s purposes that are being served at all by his coming here. Rudy is a mage, and the Realm, the world, is suddenly in desperate need of mages. And it may be that in the months to come, the Keep will have as great a need for a woman with the courage of a lion, trained in the use of a sword.”
“Maybe.” Gil rested her chin on her drawn-up knees and stared through the darkness at the dim reflections of the embers on the wall, like a streak of false dawn in the night of the Keep. “But I’m not a warrior, Ingold. I’m a scholar. It’s all I ever have been and all I’ve ever wanted to be.”
“Who can say what you are, my child?” Ingold asked softly. “Or what you may be eventually? Come,” he said, as the voices outside rose in volume. “The Guards are back. Let us go out.”
The Guards were trooping back into the room when Gil and Ingold came quietly through the curtain, the wizard leaning heavily on her shoulder. The Guards greeted him with boisterous delight, Janus all but dragging him off his feet, hauling him into the circle of the new firelight. The rose and topaz hearth-glow picked out the shabbiness of the wizard’s patched robe and the lines and hollows of strain in his face. It flickered in a warm amber radiance over scarred faces, frayed black surcoats with their white quatrefoil emblem, and seedy old blankets making shift as cloaks. The finest fighting corps in the West of this world, she thought, huddling around a scratch fire like tramps in a boxcar. Her brothers in arms. People a month ago she hadn’t even known.