Mother of Winter. Barbara Hambly

it was gone. Her dreams had been strange, and even deeper than the urge to hurt Ingold, to destroy him, was the reluctance to speak to him of the things she saw in them … And indeed, when she tried to frame those bleak, fungoid landscapes of pillowlike vegetation, the amorphous, shining shapes that writhed through it or flopped heavily a few feet above its surface, the very memory of those visions dissolved and she couldn’t recall what it was that she had seen.

      And so it happened here. When Ingold paused, raising his eyebrows at her intaken breath, her words jammed in her throat, like a stutter, or like tears that refused to be wept, and she could not remember whether she had dreamed about such a thing or not. She shook her head, embarrassed, and was deeply thankful when Ingold only nodded and said, “Interesting.”

      And she thought, almost as if she heard a voice saying it in the back of her mind, It will appear at the window. She didn’t know what it was, but she automatically checked her hand’s distance from the sword that lay next to her blankets and mentally triangulated on where Ingold’s back would be when he turned his head. Her mind was starting to protest, … like Sherry Reinhold … when Yoshabel threw up her head and squealed in terror.

      Ingold swung around; Gil came out of her blankets like a coiled spring, catching up the scabbarded blade and drawing in a single fluid, killing move. She had a dim awareness of something large and pale clinging to the lattice with limbs more like pincers than claws, of a round fanged mouth where no mouth should be and of a wet flopping sound, all subsumed by the vicious calculation of target and stroke. She wrenched the blade around and drove it into the dirt with a chop that nearly dislocated her wrists, hardly aware that she cried out as she did so, only knowing afterward, as she stood shaking like a spent runner with her hair hanging in her eyes, that her throat hurt and the painted walls were echoing with an animal scream.

      Ingold was already moving back toward her; she rasped “Not!” and fell to her knees, sweating, the wound in her face radiating a heat that consumed her being. There was an interim when she wasn’t able to see anything beyond her own white-knuckled hands gripping the sword hilt, was conscious of nothing but a wave of nausea, but he must have used the moment to stride to the window. In any case, he returned instants later. The thing outside had vanished.

      “Are you all right?”

      His voice came from a great distance away, a dull roaring like the sound within a shell. Though her eyes were open, she saw for a moment a vision of red laced with tumbling diamond fire. Then he was holding her, and she was clinging to the coarse brown wool of his robe, her face crushed to his shoulder, gripping the barrel chest and the hard rib cage to her as if they both floated in a riptide and she feared to be washed away.

      “Gilly …” He whispered her nicknames. “Gillifer, beloved, it’s all right … it’s all right.”

      The desire to pull out her knife and shove it up between his ribs drowned her in a red wave, nauseating her again. She locked her hands behind his back, fighting the voices in her mind. Then the rage ebbed, leaving in its wake only the wet shingle of failure and utter despair.

      As Rudy suspected, Graw’s urgent demand that something be done about slunch meant that patches of it had developed in his fields and pastures—which happened to lie on the best and most fertile ground in that section of the Arrow River bottomlands. Though the sun had long since vanished behind the Hammerking’s tall head when the little party reached its goal—what had once been a medium-sized villa, patched and expanded with log-and-mud additions and surrounded by what Rudy still thought of as a Wild West-style wooden palisade—Graw insisted that Rudy make a preliminary investigation of the problem.

      The villa and fort were Graw’s homestead, and everyone in them a member of the red-haired man’s family, an outright servant, or a smallholder who had pledged fealty in exchange for protection. Three of the nobles who had made the journey to the Keep from Gae had established such settlements as well, populated both by retainers and men-at-arms who had served them before the rising of the Dark, and by those farmers who sought their protection or owed them money.

      Even had Gil not filled Rudy in on their own world’s Dark Ages, he’d have been able to see where that practice was leading. It was one reason he’d acceded to Minalde’s pleading, in spite of his own unwillingness to leave the Keep with the gaboogoo question unanswered. That, and the white look around her mouth when she’d said, “It’s only a day’s journey.” The livestock at the Keep would need hay from the river-bottoms to survive the winter. Not all the broken remnants of the great Houses were particularly mindful of their vows to Alde as the Lady of the Keep.

      She didn’t need more problems than the ones she already had.

      “Now, when you folk up there started putting all kinds of rules on us instead of letting us go our own way,” Graw groused in his grating, self-pitying caw, “I had my doubts, but I was willing to give Lady Alde consideration. I mean, she’d been queen all her life and was used to it, and I thought maybe she did know more about this than me.” He shoved big rufous hands into the leather of his belt as he strode along the edge of the fields, Rudy trailing at his heels. The split rails of the fences had been reinforced with stout earth banks and a chevaux-de-frise of sharpened stakes, heavier even than the ones around the Keep wheat fields that discouraged moose and the great northern elk. This looked designed to keep out mammoths.

      “I did ask why we were supposed to send back part of our harvest, and everybody said, ‘Oh, shut up, Graw, it’s because the Keep is the repository of all True Laws and wonderful knowledge and everything that makes civilization—’ “

      “I thought the vote went that way because you were taking Keep seed, Keep axes and plows, and Keep stock,” Rudy said, cutting off the heavy-handed sarcasm, vaulting over the fence in his host’s wake.

      Graw’s face reddened still further in the orange sunset light. “Any organism that doesn’t have the courage to grow will die!” he bellowed. “The same applies to human societies. Those who try to hang on to all the old ways, to haggle as if the votes of ten yapping cowards are somehow more significant than a true man of the land who’s willing to go out and do something—”

      “When did this stuff start to grow here?” Rudy had had about enough of the Man of the Land. He halted among the rustling, leathery cornstalks, just where the plants began to droop lifeless. They lay limp and brown in a band a yard or so wide, and beyond that he could see the fat white fingers of the slunch.

      “Just after the first stalks started to come up.” Graw glared at him as if he’d sneaked down from the Vale in the middle of the night and planted the slunch himself. “You don’t think we’d have wasted the seed in a field where the stuff was already growing, do you?”

      Rudy shook his head, though he privately considered Graw the sort of man who’d do precisely that rather than waste what he wanted to consider good acreage, particularly if that acreage was his. Silly git probably told himself the situation wouldn’t get any worse. “So it’s gone from nothing to—what? About twelve feet by eighteen?—in four weeks? Have the other patches been growing this fast?”

      “How the hell should I know?” Graw yelled. “We’ve got better things to do than run around with measuring tapes! What I want to know is what you plan to do about it!”

      “Well, you know,” Rudy said conversationally, turning back toward the fence, “even though I’ve known the secret of getting rid of this stuff for the past three years, I’ve kept it to myself and just let it grow all over the fields around the Keep. But I tell you what: I’ll tell you.”

      “Don’t you get impertinent with me, boy!”

      “Then don’t assume I’m not doing my job to the best of my ability,” Rudy snapped. “I’ll come out here in the morning to take a good look at this stuff, but—”

      Voices halooed in the woods beyond the field, and there was a great crashing in the thickets of maple and hackberry along the dense green verge of the trees. Someone yelled, “Whoa, there she goes!” and another cried, “Oh, mine, mine!”

      There was laughter,