He sighed. This was getting more and more complicated. "Let me speak to the wench."
She was dreaming about Ruvis. Or Mal or Dub or goodness knew who else-someone with long blond hair and muscular buttocks. The Icefalcon poked Hethya in the shoulder with his toe. She wriggled out from under and sat up, startled and protesting, hay in her rumpled hair: they were in a barn loft, sometime before the rising of the Dark.
Wide windows opened to night and summer hay, and in the moment before Hethya's face and body assumed their present-day appearance she seemed no more than a girl of seventeen.
And beautiful. thought the Icefalcon. Gay and wild as a pony in springtime.
"You?" she said, clearly discomposed. She frowned. "You're the one..."
"Who rescued you in the Vale at the last quarter moon, the more fool I."
She scratched hay and flowers out of her hair and pulled up her bodice to cover a sailor's paradise of breast. Her handsome lover folded away into a trick of the moonlight.
"I can get you out of the cell," the Icefalcon said shortly. "Will you go? Tir can lead you to a hiding place while I find a route to get you to hiding outside the Keep the next time they open the Doors. Tir seems to trust you."
The lush mouth tightened down hard, and she looked aside. "Poor infant. Poor little child."
"Poor child indeed if he's got only you to guard him," retorted the Icefalcon, and she looked back at him in a flash of anger. "Or would you rather continue Vair's doxy?"
She struck at him, mouth square with anger and teeth bared, and he caught her wrist and twisted her out of his way.
She pulled free, rubbing her wrist-in the dream they both had physical form or a very strong illusion of it-banked rage like the dying fires of a burned house in her eyes.
"And what choice have I, me lanky boy? To be killed by his troops the way they killed half the other women at Prandhays, after they'd raped the lot of us six ways from the backside of next week? To be made a slave to them or sold to some bandit troop for enough mules and sheep to mount the siege at Renweth and bring His Foulness this far?"
The Icefalcon asked quietly, "is that what happened to your mother?"
"You leave me mother out of this, boy-o." She looked away, breathing hard, her face half veiled in the tangle of her hair.
"Me mother died the summer before last," she said finally. "Or that time of the year that should have been a summer, with the wheat rotten in the stem and us killin' the very cats for meat. There was fey wicked things in the woods then that killed some in the Keep-two of the little children and one of the herdboys that was Mother's pupil in spite of all his parents had to say about witches and souls. They killed Mother, too, I think-the things in the woods."
She brought up her hand, chewing her thumbnail, red mouth pulled down, ugly and hard.
"When old Vair and his stinking lot came marching up the road, there wasn't a great deal to be done nor any to say 'em nay. Her La'ship had made the Keep strong against the Dark Ones, but it'd been broken far back in the days, repaired strong, and broken again. Mother'd found the signs of it all around the walls, she said. It was nothing to Bektis and his putrid crystal Hand."
She sighed, looking down while she jerked the laces of her bodice tight. The Icefalcon propped a foot against a winnowing fork and rested his right hand on his sword-hilt. Even as a disembodied spirit within a dream he did not discount the possibility of attack.
"Mother always said the more we knew of the Keep-the more anybody knew of anything-the better everyone's chances would be. She'd always studied everything she could lay hand to. When she found all them papers and scrolls and tablets of gold and glass buried in the vaults of the Keep, she wouldn't rest till she'd read every one. She was like that. I don't know if you'd understand."
"I understand." The Icefalcon saw again Gil-Shalos' formidable collection and ink-stained, bandaged fingers.
"Well, there was a deal of apparatus in the Keep," Hethya went on. "Things Degendna Marina didn't tell the Lady Minalde about, and we kept finding more. Men would hunt for it in the vaults and in these sort of tombs in the hills north of Prandhays.
"Somebody found if you buried bits of it under your fields the insects wouldn't eat the corn-at least that's what they claimed. Or that it would draw deer into traps, or put under a mattress would let a man be seven times a hero in bed, though that was wishful thinking so far as I could ever tell.
"Still, those who found the stuff, for all me mother's pleading and her La'ship's orders, they'd break it up and sell the bits to any who'd aught to trade for it: a bit of land that bordered the spring or a cell closer to the fountains or the latrines, or maybe just a fine iron pot. I bought back pieces of it for her, whenever I could. I told her I traded sewing for it." Her eyes met his, steadily, jeeringly, daring him to speak.
He only said, "Ah."
"Well." She let out her breath. "And for nothing, in the end of it all. Mother had parchments, drawings of these things, and how some of them worked, all written out as far as she could figure 'em, though they could only be worked by wizards. She said a lot of the instructions weren't clear even at that, or had gone missing over the years." She waded through the hay to the loft windows, jade moonlight and oceanic dark.
"Like it?"
The Icefalcon followed politely. Stubble meadows and neat orchards lay half guessed behind hurdles of withe, fruit gleaming faintly among inky leaves. Sheep grazed the stubble. Somewhere someone played a mandolin; a drum tapped dance rhythms.
He thought, The heart of mud-digger laziness. But there was pride in her voice.
"Father loved this farm, put his heart and his sweat and his soul in it. He kept asking me when I'd decide which beau to wed so he could train him up in its management, the way he tried to train me. Poor Dad."
She shook her head. "I was too much Mother's daughter to be a yeoman farmer, but I hadn't her power.
Even all her reading, I just followed what I chose of it, for the fun of the thing. I never knew all those lists of True Names she was after memorizing, nor could tell a sassafras from a dogwood. But when Vair and his boys showed up and started lookin' about for anyone they could sell, I rolled up my eyes and went into a fit and gave it all to 'em about Oale Niu. She was originally a princess I'd made up stories about, I and me girlfriend Lotis, when we were little-later on I told 'em to me daughter. Lotis was dead by the time Vair came."
She looked back over her round white shoulder at him, watching his reaction from under thick lashes.
Below them her father's land lay still and sweet, like the Night River Country before the coming of the ice.
Should someone enter his dreams, he wondered, would they walk through the flowering reed beds along the Night River or see otters there playing in the birch-fringed pools?
"Is that what you were after learning, me bonny iceberg? Who this slut is that lets Vair tell her what to do?"
"No," the Icefalcon said, more quietly than he had spoken at first. "What I want to know is, will you hide with Tir in the Keep until I can get you both out? Look after the boy? Not hand him over to Vair to save your own skin?"
Hethya sighed and pressed her forehead to the wood of the window frame. "'Tis madness." She sounded weary unto death. "He'll find us in time. He needs the child. Whatever it is the boy knows he won't be letting him go."
"The Keep is large," said the Icefalcon. "Tir knows it. You don't happen to know what it is that Vair is so eager to learn?"
Her head moved again, No. "I'm not so sure the child himself knows, poor little lamb, for all that Bektis was after telling our stinkissimo about the memories of the House of Dare. If their memories were so bloody exact, why didn't old Eldor remember how they'd put the Dark Ones to rout, instead of lettin' a thousand men die that could have stayed in Prandhays and kept the bandits away? Liars," she whispered, shutting her eyes in despair. "All of 'em, liars."