01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

He hadn't known then that it would cost him Minalde. He hadn't known it would cost him everything that he was, for that was what it amounted to. But if the question is the answer, it wouldn't have mattered if I knew or not. He only knew that if he had turned away, he would always have been sure that he'd had it within his grip and let it go. He knew that he couldn't have let it be taken from him a second time.

The fire crackled, the wood sighing as it broke and fell. Rudy took a stout branch and rearranged it. The shower of ascending sparks glittered like fireworks among the spitting snow. He huddled deeper into his cloak, then glanced back in the direction of the camp. By the renewed light of the fire he could see a dark figure walking toward him, wrapped from head to heel in fur. Her black cloud of hair blew about her in the wind, and the firelight, when she drew near him, laid blue and golden shadows across her violet eyes.

CHAPTER TWELVE

"Be still. Let your mind be silent. See nothing but the flames." The hypnotic smoothness of Ingold's voice filled Rudy's mind as he stared at the brightness of the Guards' campfire by which he sat. He tried to push aside his own chasing thoughts, his fatigue and need for sleep, and his wondering about the White Raiders he thought he'd glimpsed, dogging the line of march. He tried to think of nothing but the fire, to see nothing but the little cluster of sticks, transfigured by the flames and heat. He found that the less he tried to think of something, the stronger it crowded back.

"Relax," Ingold said softly. "Don't worry about anything for the time being. Only look at the fire and breathe."

The wizard turned away to speak to a middle-aged woman who'd appeared on the edge of the Guards' encampment with a sickly-looking young boy in tow.

Doggedly, Rudy tried to obey his last instructions. The cold, overcast daylight was fading out of the sky again, the eighth day from Karst. Voices bickered distantly along the line of the road as thin rations were handed out. Far off he heard the castanet-click of wooden practice swords and the harsh bark of Gnift's sarcasm blistering his exhausted students. Somewhere he heard Alde singing and Tir's little crowing voice joining in, making baby sounds of joy. A feeling went through him such as he'd never known before, a desperate tangle of yearning and relief and affection, and it distracted him hopelessly from the matter at hand.

He glanced up. Ingold was sitting on his heels, looking gravely into the sick youngster's dutifully opened mouth, then into his eyes and ears. The mother wore that harried, angry look so common in the refugee train now. She was looking away, pretending she hadn't brought her son to an old excommunicate wizard; but her eyes slid back to the child, anxious and afraid. There were doctors in the West of the World who were not wizards, but few of them had survived the coming of the Dark. Those few who moved south with the convoy had their hands full, between sickness and exposure, fatigue and starvation; people were not as fastidious about going to a wizard for help as they had once been.

Ingold stood up and spoke briefly to the woman, his hand resting on the boy's dark, ruffled hair. When they had gone, he turned back to Rudy and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Rudy shrugged helplessly. "What am I supposed to be looking for?" he asked.

Ingold's eyes narrowed. "Nothing. Just look at the fire. See how it shapes itself."

"I have looked," Rudy protested. "And all I see is fire."

"And what," Ingold asked tartly, "did you expect to see?"

"Uh- I mean-" Rudy was conscious of having missed the boat somewhere but wasn't sure where. "I see you watch the fire every night and I know for sure you aren't just watching wood burn."

"No," the wizard said. "And when you've been a wizard for fifty years, maybe you'll see more than that, also. You must love things wholly for their own sake, Rudy, before they will give themselves to you."

"Sometimes I just don't understand," Rudy said much later to Alde, when she'd slipped away from her wagon to sit in the warmth of their shared cloak. "I feel that I should understand all this stuff, but I don't. I don't even know what I don't know-I feel as if I've been dumped in the ocean and I'm trying to swim, but it's a million miles deep. I don't even know how deep it is." He shook his head. "It's crazy. A month ago-" He broke off, unable to explain to this girl, who had grown up knowing kings and mages, that a month ago he would have laughed at anyone claiming to possess such powers.