In a toneless voice, he said, "No, it doesn't." Turning on his heel, he strode away into darkness.
"Rudy!" The desperation in Aide's voice stopped him as he crossed the common room. Looking back, he saw that she had run after him, down shortcuts that only she and Gil could have found. Tears gleamed on her face, and the sight of them broke and drained the anger in him, leaving only grief and pity for her sake. He held out his arms to her without a word.
For a moment they could only hold each other in silence, her face buried in the damp, rough wool of his coatcollar. her scented hair tickling against his lips. Then they kissed, feverishly, as if trying to deny what they both knew to be true. The hot saltiness of her tears burned where they touched his chin.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "Aide, I'm sorry."
He felt her arms lock tighter about his body, felt through his grip the shuddering draw of her breath. He had not known her long, but already it seemed strange to him that he had ever known the feel of any other woman's body in his arms.
She shook her head. "No," she murmured. "Don't be sorry, Rudy-not for this." Her words were muffled against his chest.
In the hearth a log broke, and the sudden spurt of gold threw their shadows leaping on the opposite wall.
"It was always going to be temporary, wasn't it? And then it seemed as if we both forgot it. But I wanted to forget. It seemed that you'd been here forever- and would be-" She stopped, and against his chest he felt the determined tightening of her jaw and the stifled trembling of her ribs. Then she shook her head again, the red flickering of the ember light tipping her hair with carnelian. She swallowed hard. "This world was never your own. You have no choice, have you?"
"No," Rudy whispered bitterly. "No, I have no choice."
She let out her breath in a long, thick sigh and rested her forehead against his shoulder. "Then there's not much we can say, is there?" she murmured. "Sometimes. I think we never have the choice. That no one has the choice. How long do we have?"
His voice was almost inaudible against the fragrance of her hair. "Until the Winter Feast. After the Feast, the army will leave for Gae. And after..."
She shook her head, the soft skin of her temple gritting on his unshaven jaw. "There won't be any after," she said. "It was all fate, wasn't it? Fate that you came here, so you could discover how to make the flame throwers to use against the Dark. And after fate is done with you, you must return to your own world. Isn't that how the universe works?"
His arms tightened around her body, feeling the smallness of her bones through gauze and velvet and soft flesh. "Ingold's always saying there's no such thing as chance. But for Chrissake, why did fate decide it had to work out this way?"
She looked up at him, shaking back her hair; the front part was braided, the back fell in a loose cascade over his hands where they rested upon her waist. "It worked out this way because I would have begged it to," she whispered. "Rudy- better this little than nothing at all. I've been happier with you than I have ever been in my life. Do you know, you have spent more time with me between your journeyings with Ingold than Eldor ever did in the thirty months we were husband and wife? And I have never feared you, never felt helpless or stupid or like some gauche, stammering child in your presence. You've never expected me to be other than what I am..."
"What did Eldor expect you to be?"
"I don't know!" she cried. The words broke from her like long-pent floodwaters. "But it was in his eyes when he'd look at me and then look away. I gave him all that I was, but since it wasn't what he wanted, it was as if he didn't know, or didn't care, that it was everything. I was sixteen. I loved him. I worshipped him. If I had known you then..." She stumbled to a halt, her lashes beaded with tears like diamonds in the firelight.
Rudy bent his lips, kissing the glittering droplets. "Nah," he said softly, "they wouldn't have let you marry some old wizard's apprentice anyway. And besides, when you were sixteen, I bet you were flat-chested and pimply."
"I never had pimples," she argued, choking on tears and unexpected laughter. "Stop it! You make me laugh."
"That's not all I'll make you," he murmured through her lips.
"You all right?"
Ingold nodded without opening his eyes. Against the black fur of the very grubby bearskins on which he lay-the only blankets his narrow cot boasted- his face looked suddenly white under the weatherburning. Gil paused, irresolute, a cupful of smoking tea in her hands. Then she stooped to set it on the floor where he could reach it and turned to go. "You'll have a helluva time falling asleep," she remarked over her shoulder at him, "unless you take off your sword belt and your boots."
Still the wizard did not open his eyes. He merely murmured, "You're wrong about that."
But a flicker of witchlight glimmered into existence over his head and slowly spread and strengthened through the room. It picked out the delicate marquetry of the desk that she and Alde had scrounged for him from a distant storeroom on the fifth level, its pearl and pearwood surface invisible under piles of old parchment scrolls, dingy with smudged ink and greasy with lanolin. Jewel-clasped books salvaged from the ruin of Quo lay with their open pages a counterpane of red and blue and shimmering gold leaf. Among and between everything lay wax note tablets, like the tiles of a Brobdingagian Scrabble game. The mess overflowed the desk to litter the floor; the heaped books, scattered tablets, and twinkling gray glass of those enigmatic crystal polyhedrons surrounded the desk like a pool that spread itself along the wall almost to the foot of the hard, narrow cot. Gil paused, then came back and began to pull off the wizard's boots.
"The other mages will be in for dinner soon," she told him as she did so. "If I wanted to risk an amphibian future, I'd try to talk Kara's mother out of something for you now."
Outside in the common room, the harsh, screechy voice of the little witchwife Dame Nan could be heard, accusing someone-probably Dakis the Minstrel-of being a pestilent food thief, deserving of every ailment from cold sores to piles, and threatening to inflict him with the same if he dared to violate her kitchen again. Kara's reproving "Mother!" sounded faintly from another room.
Ingold smiled and shook his head. "Thank you, child," he said softly as Gil dumped the sodden boots beside the door. Then she thought he had fallen asleep, for he lay unmoving, his eyes closed and his hands resting limply at his sides. But oddly enough, Gil did not leave. She stood in the doorway looking down at him, her wide, chill gray eyes curiously blue in the fading glow of the witchlight.
"Ingold?" Her voice was barely audible against the rising chatter in the common room behind her.
"Yes, child?"
"Did you mean what you said? About its being hopeless?"
His eyes opened. For a moment, he considered her, thin and gawky, like a teenage boy in her outsize surcoat. "Hopeless or not," he murmured, "you at least will have returned to the safety of your own world by the time the army marches. But no," he added, seeing the look of grief that crossed her face, "there is always hope."
"But you don't think that in this case it lies with Rudy's flame throwers," Gil finished for him. "But, dammit, Ingold, the Dark were defeated once and driven back underground. The forces that did it can't have been much more numerous than we are here. And the Dark seem to think that you know the answer."
His eyelids drooped closed again, and he gave a faint, tired chuckle. "The answer to what question?" He sighed. "If the memory of how the Dark Ones were defeated has come down to Tir, it may very well be useless by the time he gets old enough to understand it. The Dark Ones' fear is that I will remember sooner, or that I already know."
He laughed again, a dry, weary sound. "The irony of it all is that I haven't the slightest idea what it is that they believe I know.