Free Mother of Winter by Barbara Hambly Page B

actual power.
    Ingold would have something to say to him. He didn’t even want to think about what that would be.
    He stood still, feeling suffocated, hearing behind him Graw’s bellowing voice without distinguishing words beyond, “I shoulda known a goddamn wizard would …”
    Rudy didn’t stay to hear what Graw knew about goddamn wizards. Silently he turned and made his way down the rough, sloping ground to the fence, and along it toward the fort as the half-grown children of the settlement were driving in the cattle and sheep from the fields. The long spring evening was finally darkening toward actual night, the tiger-lily brilliance of reds and golds above the mountains rusting to cinnabar as indigo swallowed the east. Crickets skreeked in the weeds along the fencerow, and by the stream Rudy could hear the peepingof frogs, an orchestral counterpoint to Graw’s bellowed commentary.
    Well
, he thought tiredly,
so much for supper
.
    He was not refused food when the extended household set planks on trestles in the main hall to eat. What he was offered was some of the best in the household. But it was offered in silence, and there was a wariness in the eyes of everyone who looked at him and then looked away. The bowman whose nose he’d broken sat at the other end of the table from him, bruises darkening horribly; he was, Rudy gathered, an extremely popular man. Rudy recalled what Ingold had told him about wizards being poisoned, or slipped drugs like yellow jessamine or passion-flower elixirs that would dull their magic so they could be dealt with, and found himself without much appetite for dinner. The huntress’ eyes were on him from the start of the meal to its finish, cold and hostile, and he heard her whispering behind his back whenever he wasn’t looking.
    After the meal was over, no one, not even those who were clearly sick, came to speak to him.
    Great
, Rudy thought, settling himself under a smoky pine torch at the far end of the hall and pulling his mantle and bison-hide vest more closely around him. The women grouped by the fire to spin and sew had started to gather up their things to leave when he approached, so he left them to work in the warmth, and contented himself with the cold of the far end of the hall.
I guess this is why Ingold makes himself so damn invisible all the time
. It didn’t take a genius to realize that from fear like this it was only a short step to bitter resentment.
Especially with little Miss Buckskin helping things along with her mouth
.
    Ingold—and Minalde—would have to put in weeks of P.R. and cleanup over this one.
    From a pocket of the vest he took his scrying stone, an amethyst crystal twice the width of his thumb and nearly as long as his palm, and tilted its facets toward the light.
    And there she was. Alde, cutting out a new tunic for herself by the light of three glowstones, working carefullyaround the unaccustomed bulk of her belly—smiling a little and reaching up to adjust the gold pins in her hair, final jeweled relics of the wealth of the High King’s realm. Tir and Geppy Nool and a little girl named Thya made cat’s cradles of the wool from the knitting basket, and Thya’s mother, Linnet—a slim brown woman of thirty or so who was Alde’s maid and good friend—knitted and talked. The black walls of the chamber were bright with familiar hangings; Alde’s cat Archbishop stalked a trailing end of yarn, dignified lunacy in his golden eyes.
    Uneasy, Rudy tilted the crystal, calling to being in it the corridors of the fourth level, and the fifth; picturing in his mind the chalky little gremlin he had seen.
    But there was nothing. No sign of the creature anywhere in the Keep. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The Dead Cells in the Church territory and some of the royal prisons were proof against Rudy’s scrying—there were other cells as well from which he could not summon an image.
    But it was hard to believe that the eyeless critter, whatever it was,