01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Ingold's voice was grave in the darkness, and she saw the faint touch of light on his cheekbone as he turned his head. "You once accused me of dealing, mage-like, in double talk. But truly, Gil, I do not know. I do not understand any more than you do. But I believe there is a purpose to your being here. Believe me, Gil. Please believe me."

She shrugged, embarrassed as she always was by anyone's concern. "It's not important," she lied, and she knew Ingold heard the lie. "You know, I resented it like hell when you told me Rudy would be a wizard. Not because I wanted to be one, but-it's as if he's gained everything and lost nothing, because he really had nothing that he cared about to lose. But I lost everything... " She broke off, the silence coming between them like the ocean between a swimmer and the shore.

"And gained nothing?" To that she could not reply. "It may be that it is not Rudy's purposes that are being served at all by his coming here. Rudy is a mage, and the Realm, the world, is suddenly in desperate need of mages. And it may be that in the months to come, the Keep will have as great a need for a woman with the courage of a lion, trained in the use of a sword."

"Maybe." Gil rested her chin on her drawn-up knees and stared through the darkness at the dim reflections of the embers on the wall, like a streak of false dawn in the night of the Keep. "But I'm not a warrior, Ingold. I'm a scholar. It's all I ever have been and all I've ever wanted to be."

"Who can say what you are, my child?" Ingold asked softly. "Or what you may be eventually? Come," he said, as the voices outside rose in volume. "The Guards are back. Let us go out."

The Guards were trooping back into the room when Gil and Ingold came quietly through the curtain, the wizard leaning heavily on her shoulder. The Guards greeted him with boisterous delight, Janus all but dragging him off his feet, hauling him into the circle of the new firelight. The rose and topaz hearth-glow picked out the shabbiness of the wizard's patched robe and the lines and hollows of strain in his face. It flickered in a warm amber radiance over scarred faces, frayed black surcoats with their white quatrefoil emblem, and seedy old blankets making shift as cloaks. The finest fighting corps in the West of this world, she thought, huddling around a scratch fire like tramps in a boxcar. Her brothers in arms. People a month ago she hadn't even known.

Yet their faces were so familiar. Janus' blunt, square mug she'd seen, nameless, for the first time by the cold light of a quarter moon in a frightful dream whose memory was clearer to her than the memory of many college parties she'd attended. And those white braids draped over a sleeper's anonymous shoulders-she remembered them, briefly, from that same dream, remembered wondering if their owner was the foreigner he looked to be. They had been nothing to her then-extras in a drama whose significance she had not grasped. Yet she knew them now better than she had known any of her otherworld lovers-better, with one exception, than she had ever known anyone in her life.

Ingold was sitting near the hearth at the head of the Icefalcon's bed, the Guards around him, his gestures expansive, relating some story that made Janus throw back his head with laughter.

A voice spoke at Gil's elbow. "Well, he's alive, anyway."

She looked over and saw Rudy leaning against the wall on the other side of the curtained arch. His long hair was tied back, and that and the firelight made his rather aquiline face more hawklike than ever in the dim orange light. He had changed, she thought, since that night he had called the fire. Older, maybe. And not so much different as more like himself than he had been before.

"I'm worried about him, Rudy."

"He's tough," Rudy said, though his tone was uneasy. "He'll be okay. Hell, he'll probably outlive thee and me." But he knew that this was not what she meant.

"What if he gets killed, Rudy?" Gil asked softly. "What happens to us then?"

He had turned his mind away from that thought time and time again, since the night in Karst when Ingold had disappeared, imprisoned by order of the council. He whispered, "Hell, I don't know."

"That's what bothers me," Gil went on, hooking her bony hands with their nicks and scars and practice-blisters through the beat-up leather of her sword belt. "That's what's bothered me all the way along. That maybe there's no going back."

The question is the answer, Rudy thought. The question is always the answer. "But there's no going back from anything we do," he said. "Not from anything we are. It changes us, good and bad. What it is, we become. If we're stuck, we're stuck. Would that be so bad? I've found my power here, Gil, what I've always been looking for. And a lady in ten million. And you... "

"A home," Gil said simply, realizing the truth. "What I've always been looking for."