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.”
And suddenly, unexpectedly, Gil began to laugh. Not hysterically, or nervously, but with a soft, wholehearted chuckle of genuine amusement. Rudy could not remember ever seeing her laugh. It darkened her frost-gray eyes to blue and softened the bony hardness of her white face.
“And my advisor will love it.” She grinned up at him. “What a Ph.D. thesis! ‘Effects of Subterranean Incursions on Preindustrial Culture.’ ”
“I’m not kidding,” Rudy protested, still astonished at how changed she was, how beautiful, scars and swords and all.
“Neither am I.” And she laughed again.
Rudy shook his head, amazed at the difference in her. “So tell me truthfully,” he said. “Would you go back from this? If it was a choice between the other world and what you have and where you are now, and if this had all never been—would you go back?”
Gil looked at him consideringly for a moment. Then she turned her eyes back to the hearth, to Ingold, his warm, rasping voice holding his listeners enspelled, to the firelight on the faces of the Guards and the blackness of the shadows beyond, and, past that, to the dark weight of the Keep, the night it held within its walls, and the shifting, wind-stirred night that waited outside. “No,” she said finally. “I think I must be crazy to say so, but no, I wouldn’t.”
“Lady.” Rudy grinned, touching the emblem of the Guards she bore on her shoulder. “If you weren’t crazy, you wouldn’t be wearing that.”
Gil looked him speculatively up and down. “You know, for a punk you have a lot of class.”
“For a spook,” Rudy said gravely, “it’s real perceptive of you to notice.”
The two of them went to join Ingold by the fire.