01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

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."