bruised mass of cuts, the blood from them leaking slowly into his beard.
'You mean - that was a friend of yours?'
'I think so,' Ingold whispered.
'But - why would he do it? Why would he change himself into a dragon in the first place?'
Ingold sighed, and the sound was like a death rattle in his throat. He wiped his eyes, and his sleeve came away fouled with red, gritty slime. 'I don't know, Rudy. The answer to that lies in Quo. And I'm beginning to fear what that answer is.'
Chapter 13
Night walked the halls of Dare's Keep, bringing darkness and the soft stirring of sleepers, through cell on cell and corridor on corridor of those ancient and storied mazes. There was stillness, except for the uneasy breath of the moving air, and silence, except where, here and there, sleepers would wake with cries from hideous and identical dreams.
The small gleam of the lamplight gilded the round globes of a sandglass and licked with tiny flames on the scrollwork at the fancy end of Gil's silver hairpin. The worn wax of her tablets glowed a creamy yellow where the light touched, and the intricate fretwork of the tablet's narrow frame gleamed mahogany red, like old claret. Around her, the study was silent.
This was the new study, to which she and Aide had carried the increasing quantities of tablets, parchments, and artifacts scrounged from the lab levels below. The lamplight picked out shapes on the table: polyhedrons, milky white or crystal grey, a scattering of faceted jewels, odd, tubular mechanisms of gold and glass, and strangely shaped entities of metal and wood, some hard and angular, others sinuous, shaped to the hand. There were stacks of wax tablets and piles of dirty, mildewed, overwritten parchments - the stuff of failed scholarship, the jigsaw puzzle whose message, Gil feared, would be delivered the hard way.
The message was now, to her, very clear. She'd tracked it like a long-forgotten spoor through her notes, tangling on old words, old spellings, changes of dialect, and the language itself. The correlation was not invariable, but it was there. Not all Nests had had the citadels of wizardry built near them in the early days when the healers and seers and loremasters had held power, in these northern realms, comparable with that of the mighty Church of the south. But all citadels of wizardry - and
the cities that had grown up around them - had been built somewhere near the Nests.
Gil threw her silver stylus aside and began to pace the room. Her shoulder ached, the muscles violently complaining of the renewed rigours of practice; her hands hurt, blistered from the sword hilt, her fingers so stiffened that it was hard to write. Her hair fell in a sweaty straggle around her face, to hang in a sloppy braid behind. And her head ached, blinded by fatigue and worry and fear. She knew how Ingold must have felt, trying desperately to contact Lohiro and unable to do so, forced to baby-sit the convoy down from Karst when he could have been on his way to Quo already. And, she reflected wryly, getting damn little thanks for his trouble.
Why do I care? she wondered desperately. Why am I concerned, why do I fear this way for him and grieve with him in his grief? This world is none of mine 'and I'll be returning to my own, to a place where the sun shines and there's always enough to eat. Why do I hurt this way?
But as Ingold always said, the question was the answer. Always provided, she added wryly, you want an answer that badlv.
'Gil?'
She looked up. Minalde blew out the touchlight she carried and stepped through the thin veil of its smoke. She looked white and tired, as if from exhausting labour. As she stepped into the tiny circle of the lamplight, Gil could see she had been crying.
There was no need to ask why. Gil knew there'd been a Council that evening, and Aide was still dressed for it, the high-necked black velvet of her gown sewn with the gold eagles of the House of Dare that glittered as if she had been sprinkled with fire. The braided coils of her hair flashed with jewels. This was Aide as Queen, and very different from the girl in her thin peasant skirts and worn bodice who hurried so eagerly through the corridors of the Keep.
She brought up a folding chair and sat down, mechanically stripping the rings from her fingers and her ears, her face as unmoving as wax. Gil sat opposite her, watching in silence, toying self-consciously with her curlicued silver hairpin.
After a long time Aide said shakily, 'I wish he wouldn't do this to me.' Her trembling fingers dropped a ring, a signet carved out of a single blood ruby.
'How did the Council go?' Gil asked gently, to get her talking.
Aide shook her head, pressing her folded hands against her mouth to keep it from trembling. Finally she steadied her voice. 'I don't know why it keeps on hurting me when he gets like this, but it does. Gil, I know I'm right. Maybe I am wanting -
wanting to eat my cake and still have it to look at, at the expense of our allies. But they can afford to feed their own troops. We can't, not if we're going to have enough seed in the spring to mean anything. And yes, I know we had trade commitments to them for corn and cattle, but those were made years ago, and everything's changed. And yes, I know I'm trying to welsh out of a bad debt when the going gets tough, but God damn it, Gil, what can we do?' Her voice rose, cracking, skimming almost unnoticed over the first swearword Gil had ever heard her utter. 'But I'm not going to buy our way out of those debts by signing away part of the Realm! I've learned enough from you and Govannin about legal precedents for that. If I sign that treaty...'
'Wait a minute,' Gil said, trying to cut the rising flood of fury and pain and guilt. 'What treaty? What part of the Realm do they want you to sign away?'
The words broke the flow of Aide's emotions as a rock breaks the coming of a wave, reducing its force. She sat still for a moment, her white fingers stirring at the little heap of jewels before her, like miniature coals dyed with reflected flames of crimson, azure, and gold. 'Penambra,' she said finally.
'Penambra!' Gil cried, horrified. 'That's like selling New Orleans to the Cubans! That seaport's the key to the whole Round Sea. If you sign it over to the Alketch, they'd hold that whole coastline!'
Aide looked up hopelessly. 'I know,' she said. 'And I know it's flooded and there's nothing there but the Dark and ghouls and ruins. It's worthless to us; we can't hold it if we don't get a - a bridgehead at Gae. Alwir says that would be paying the Emperor of Alketch in counterfeit coin, and we can always take it back. He wants a bargain with Stiarth at any cost.'
'You didn't sign, did you?' Gil asked worriedly.
Aide shook her head. 'Afterward, he said I'd ruined us all.' She sniffed and wiped at her nose, the fine-carved nostrils red and raw. 'He said I'd condemned us to rotting here in the Keep while the Realm was hacked apart piecemeal between the White Raiders and Alketch, all because I wanted to cling to - to the pride of being Queen...'
The slight quavering of her voice told its tale. Alwir's accusations generally had theirdrop of truth, enough truth to plant doubt in his opponents' minds as to their own motivations. As a girl, Minalde had preened herself about being Queen pride was part of the office. And, being Aide, she had probably felt guilty about it and maybe even handed her brother the wedge by admitting it to him. Bastard, Gil thought dispassionately.