01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"Cover?" Alwir swung around to face him, his voice jeering. "Shroud, you mean. We'll freeze to death... "

"You'll freeze just as quickly here," Ingold pointed out.

Piqued, Bektis announced primly, "I am quite capable of holding off such a storm as this... "

"And the Dark as well?" Ingold retorted.

The sorcerer stared at him for a moment, hatred in his narrow face, and a watery flush of red crept up under his white cheeks.

Without waiting for his reply, Ingold said, "Nor could I. There are limits to all power."

"And to all endurance," the Bishop said imperturbably. "And I for one will not be stampeded by fear, like a sheep into the shambles. We can weather this storm and push on in the daylight."

"And if the storm does not break until this time tomorrow?"

Alwir leaned a kid-gloved hand on the back of his carved chair. "Don't you think you're putting too much importance on this storm? I am agreeable to whatever may be voted, provided I can find cartage for the effects of the government... "

Govannin's eyes blazed. "Not at the cost of-"

"Don't be a pair of fools." The words were spoken quietly as the white embroidery of the tent-curtains rippled, and a girl stood framed in gleaming silk against the shadows of the room beyond. Minalde's face was very white against the raven blackness of her unbound hair. She was wrapped for warmth in a star-decorated quilt, holding Tir against her under its folds. The child's eyes, wide and wandering in fascination over the lamplit ulterior of the tent, were a jewel-blue echo of his mother's and of Alwir's own.

"You are both acting like fools," she went on in a low voice. "The tide is rising, and you are arguing about who will be the first one into the boat."

Alwir's aristocratic nostrils flared in annoyance, but he only said, "Minalde, go back to your room."

"I will not," she replied in that same quiet voice.

"This is none of your affair." His was the voice of a man to a recalcitrant child.

"It is my affair." She kept her words soft, but Alwir and Rudy both stared at her, more astonished than if she had burst forth into colorful profanity. All the breath went out of Alwir as if she'd kicked him; he had obviously never even considered that his gentle and acquiescent little sister would defy him. Rudy, who remembered how she'd shoved a torch into his face on the haunted stairs at Karst, was less surprised.

"Tir is my son," she continued. "Your stubbornness could get him killed."

The Chancellor's impassive face flushed; he looked ready to tell her to mind her tongue before her elders and betters. But she was, after all, Queen of Darwath.

"If what my lord Ingold says is true," he said.

"I believe him," she said. "And I trust him. And I will go on with him to the Keep tonight, if I go alone."

From where she stood in Ingold's shadow by the corner of the tent, Gil could see that this girl, wrapped in stars and darkness, was trembling. It couldn't have been easy to defy a man who, by all accounts, had run her life for years; Gil's respect for Minalde, who had been up to this moment merely a name and a silhouette in the darkness, increased.

"Thank you for your trust, my lady," Ingold said quietly, and their eyes met for a moment. Gil knew from experience that the wizard's gaze could strip the spirit bare and defenseless; but whatever Alde saw in his eyes, it must have reassured her, for she turned away with a straight back and an air of resolution.

Alwir caught her arm, drew her to him, and said something that none of them could catch, but his face was intent and angry. Alde pulled her arm from his grip and went inside without a word. It was just as well that she did, for she did not see her brother's face, transformed by cold rage into the mask Gil had seen when first she'd entered the tent, a mask all the more inhuman because it was so impersonal. But when he turned back to them, his smile was deprecating. "It appears," he said, "that we are moving on tonight after all."

It was clear that this was the opening line to something else, but the Bishop cut him off so smoothly that the interruption had every appearance of being accidental. "If that is so," she said in her slow, dry voice, "I must go and make ready the wagons of the Church." And she was gone, far more quickly than anyone would have believed possible, before he could speak any command.