Gil raised her eyes to meet Aide's. "Your brother's set on this alliance, isn't he?"
Aide sighed and brushed the hair back from her face. Her white, too-slender fingers looked like bones against the thick braids. "He's like a-a man in love, Gil. You know Stiarth came north with gifts, things we haven't had since Gae fell - bolts of velvet and musical instruments, scissors and books. He gave me these..."
She drew her dark skirt hem aside, to show beneath her white petticoat the pointed toes of slippers of heliotrope satin, brocaded and stitched with pearls. "Alwir goes on for hours about trade with the South, about renewing the civilization we've lost, once we've taken Gae. Alwir always wanted things to be the best, you know. He loves the fine things, the beauties of civilization. He's an aesthete at heart. The crudities of living here at the Keep rankle him like a sore. You know it. You've seen him."
Gil reflected upon the Chancellor's immaculate tailoring, the fineness with which he surrounded himself, and the scent of soap and perfume. Being this pedestal of perfection had served to set him apart from his increasingly shabby subjects. But she had also noticed that Aide, in her peasant skirts and painted ski vest, had lost none of her subjects' hearts.
"But it isn't only that," Alde went on quietly. "If we're going to try to retake anything from the Dark, it has to be now. Who knows what will happen by spring? Of all the landchiefs of the Realm, only Tomec Tirkenson answered Alwir's call, and we know at least four others survived. Alwir's right in one thing -if we can retake the cornlands around Gae, we can establish some kind of alliance with Alketch based on trade, rather than face them next year as our invaders."
Gil bit back a cynical remark and carefully began to Crosshatch the patterns she had scratched in the wax.
Witchlight brightened into the room, twinkling on the grainy edges of the piled record crystals. Rudy entered, disheveled and unshaven, his eyes red from strain, his hands and face marked with soot that he'd washed off without the aid of a mirror.
"Hi, spook," he greeted Gil, then bent to kiss Aide, drawing her up into his arms in a mingled fever of joy and grief.
Waking, Tir raised eager arms and cooed sleepily, " 'Udy! Udy!"
With a wry grin, Rudy went to pick him up. "What's your mom been feeding you, Pugsley, rocks? Everybody in the Keep's griping about food and swiping food from each other, and you just keep on getting fatter. How come that, hunh?"
Tir only laughed joyously. The accusation was hardly true, for he was a small baby and gave promise of growing into a boy as slim and compact as his mother. As far as anyone could ascertain, he was absolutely fearless, his increased mobility-he could toddle, after a fashion-simply widening his scope for adventures.
"I think we've just about killed the supply of firing chambers." Rudy sighed, sinking down on the bench beside Alde and rubbing his eyes. "We've come up with a total of fifty-two, and that's by searching the storerooms from top to bottom. There are nearly eighty in the firesquad; we'll have to use the extra people as alternates. This inventor noise is for the birds," he added, as Alde stood behind him and kneaded his shoulders with her fingertips. "I shoulda stayed at Wild David's Paint and Body."
"Is it true the Ambassador has asked for a demonstration of the firesquad?" Alde asked.
"Melantrys is already drilling her people for it," Rudy replied, his eyes closed in ecstasy. "Have you ever thought of going into back rubs as a profession? I'll have something ready for his Nibs in a day or so." He reached up, stilling Aide's hands, and opened his eyes to look up into hers. "He's worried about his troops," he explained unnecessarily. "Christ, I'm worried, too."
With very good reason , Gil thought, but she held her peace. After they had gone, she sat for a long time, thinking of Rudy and Aide, of the Winter Feast, and of the Dark. Silence settled upon the black mazes around her. The glow-stone on her desk cast her shadow huge and hard on the grimy wall behind her, picked out, as that white light had a way of doing, every splinter and nick in the grain of her wooden table, and edged every parchment in shadow, every crystal in light. It showed up the dirtiness and pokiness of the tiny room, the claustrophobic atmosphere that Gil had begun to grow used to-the lack of furniture, the trestle table, the heaps of furs, the worn straw pallets, and the frayed edge of her surcoat sleeve. A faint odor of cooking grease and unwashed bodies pervaded everything. No wonder , she thought, that Alwir finds himself seduced by purple satin slippers and a steady supply of soap. He's probably the only man with a stock of whole clothes in the Keep. God knows where he came up with the banners he used to greet Vair. But he knows his supplies are limited .
As a historian, Gil was too familiar with the economic domination of a depressed, underpopulated, and largely rural area by a wealthy manufacturing one. And what's more , she thought, Alwir wouldn't half mind being someone's satrap, if he could do it with comfort and prestige. Better a rich man's house nigger than a starving poor white .
A sound came to her ears from somewhere in the cells that surrounded her study. It was very late, and the other sounds of the Corps HQ had sunk away into silence and sleep.
Otherwise, distant and muffled as the sound was, Gil would never have heard it. But it came to her, faint yet startling in its harsh violence-the sound of a man crying.
Gil sat for a moment, disquieted and almost ashamed. Like most unmarried women, she had never seen a man weep and she felt a horrible sense of eavesdropping, more shameful than if she had overheard the sounds of lovemaking. It wasn't inconceivable that someone of that enchanted rabble who occupied the surrounding cells would have the horrors and regrets of a destroyed home to mourn. And she had seen for herself the look that lurked behind the eyes of all those who had been down into the Nests.
But the despair and horror of that heartbroken sobbing drove her away, and she abandoned her research and her study to seek the silence of the common room. Such grief was none of her business. She knew that, if ever she were driven to weep as that man wept, she would sure as hell not like to think that she was being overheard.
It was almost pitch-dark in the common room. The muted flicker of writhing embers showed where the hearth lay, but it illuminated nothing. Gil stumbled against a chair, catching herself on its curved back, and spared a curse for wizards who saw so effortlessly in the dark.
The only other light in the room was the marshfire flicker of bluish light that outlined the curtain of Ingold's cubicle. As she approached it, she could hear the soft scratching of his pen.
"My dear." He held out his hands to her as she came in, the frayed brown mantle that he had draped shawlwise about his shoulders sliding down over the back of his intricately carved and much-mended chair. As always, his hands were warm; and as always, his touch seemed to transmit to her some of his buoyant strength. For a moment, he studied the marks of fatigue on her face, the bruised look to the eyelids, and the sharpness of that hard, delicate bone structure, but said nothing; he was too much a night owl himself to comment. But he cleared a place for her to sit in the confusion of the corner of his desk top and went to the narrow hearth to pour her some tea.
Gil looked down at the parchment upon which he was working. Spaghettilike in their intricacy, the tunnels and caverns of a map of the Nest writhed over the page. She looked up at the old man kneeling beside the hearth, the warm light seeming to shine through his extended hands. "You don't think Alwir's going to buy it, do you?"
Ingold glanced up. "Do you?"
Gil was shocked. "He has to," she protested. "I have proof-dammit, I have a truckload of proof! He can't just disregard it!"