Mother of Winter. Barbara Hambly

of his brows. In thought like this he seemed older than five years.

      “He went riding every morning on horses by the river and all his servants had to go with him,” Tir went on after a moment. “They’d all carry bows and arrows, except the boy’s servants had to carry the boy’s bows and arrows for him. They’d shoot birds by the river …”

      His frown deepened, distressed. “They shot birds that were pretty, not because they wanted to eat them. There was a black bird with long legs wading in the river, and it had a little crown of white feathers on its head, and the boy shot at it with his arrows. When it flew away, the boy told his servants, ‘I would that you take this creature with net and lime,’ “ his voice stumbled over unfamiliar words, an antique inflection, “ ‘and bring it to me, for I will not be robbed of my … my quarry …’ What’s quarry, Rudy?” He opened his eyes.

      “Quarry is what you catch when you go hunting.” Rudy gazed into the hearth, wondering how long it had been since black egrets had haunted the marshlands below the royal city of Gae. A hundred years? Two hundred? It was part of his wizardry to know, but at the moment he couldn’t remember. Ingold could have provided the information out of his head, along with a mild remark about junior mages who needed their notes about such things tattooed on their arms—along with their own names—for lagniappe. “Sounds like a mean boy to me, Pugsley.”

      “He was.” Tir’s eyes slipped shut again, but his face was troubled now, as he picked and teased at the knot of deep-buried memories, the recollections of another life. “He was mean because he was scared all the time. He was scared … he was scared …” He groped for the thought. “He thought everybody was going to try to hurt him, so they could make somebody else king and not him. His daddy’s brothers, and their children. His daddy told him that. His daddy was mean, too.”

      He looked up at Rudy, who had an arm around his shoulders where they sat side by side on the sheepskin rugs of the cell floor. Even the royal chambers of the Keep of Dare were mostly small and furnished simply with ancient pieces found in the Keep, or with what had been hewn or whittled since the coming of the remnant of the Realm’s people. The journey down the Great South Road, and up the pass to the Vale of Renweth at the foot of the still higher peaks, had been a harsh one. Those who’d gone back along the route the following spring in quest of furnishings thrown aside to lighten the wagons had found them not improved by a season under mud and snow.

      “But why would being scared all the time make him be mean?” Tir wanted to know. “Wouldn’t people be nastier to him if he was mean?”

      “If they were his daddy’s servants, they couldn’t be mean back,” pointed out Rudy, who’d learned a good deal about customary behavior in monarchies since abandoning his career as a motorcycle painter and freelance screw-up in Southern California. “And maybe when he was mean he was less scared.”

      Tir nodded, seeing the truth of that but still bothered. As far as Rudy could ascertain, Tir didn’t have a mean bone in his body. “And why would his daddy’s brothers want to be king instead of the boy? Being king is awful.”

      “Maybe they didn’t know that.”

      Tir looked unconvinced.

      As well he might, Rudy thought. Tir remembered being king. Over, and over, and over.

      Most of what he recalled today would be of more interest to Gil than to himself, Rudy reflected. She was the one who was engaged—between relentless training with the Guards and her duties on patrol and watching the Keep’s single pair of metal doors—in piecing together the vast histories of the realms of Darwath and its tributary lands; its relationships with the wizards, with the great noble Houses, with the Church of the Straight God, with the southern empires and the small states of the Felwood and the distant seaboard to the east. She could probably figure out which king this mean boy who shot at netted birds had grown up to be, and who his daddy was, and what politics exactly had caused his uncles to want to snuff the little bastard—no loss, by the sound of it.

      Except that if that boy had not grown up and married, he would not have passed down his memories with his bloodline and eventually have created the child Tir.

      And that would have been tragedy.

      The wizard in Rudy noted the details remembered about the palace, identifying flowers in the garden, birds and beasts glimpsed in the trees, picturing clearly the place that he himself had only seen in ruins. But mostly what fascinated him were the workings of that far-off child’s life and family, how cruelty had meshed with cruelty, how anger had answered angers formed by fathers and grandfathers; how constant suspicion and unlimited power had resulted in a damn unpleasant little brat who quite clearly worked hard to make everyone around him as miserable as he possibly could.

      No wonder Tir’s eyes were a thousand years old.

      “Rudy?” A tousled blond head appeared around the doorway after a perfunctory knock. “M’lord Rudy,” the boy hastily amended, and added with a grin, “Hi, Tir. M’lord Rudy, Her Majesty asks if you’d come to the Doors, please. Fargin Graw’s giving her a bad time,” he added as Rudy reached for his staff and started to rise.

      “Oh, great.” Fargin Graw was someone whose nose Rudy had considered breaking for years. “Thanks, Geppy.”

      “May I go play with Geppy, Rudy?”

      “Yeah, go ahead, Ace. If I know Graw, this’ll take a while.”

      With Geppy and Tir pelting on ahead of him, Rudy walked down the broad main corridor of the royal enclave—one of the few wide halls in the Keep not to have been narrowed millennia ago by the owners of cells breaking walls to cadge space from the right of way—and down the Royal Stair. Someone had taken advantage of the draught on the stair and stretched a clothesline across the top of the high archway where the stair let into the Aisle, the black-walled cavern that ran more than three-quarters of the Keep’s nearly half-mile length. Rudy ducked under the laundry, scarcely a wizardly figure in his deerskin breeches, rough wool shirt, and gaudily painted bison-hide vest, his dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders. Only his staff, pale wood worn with generations of hand grips and tipped by a metal crescent upon whose sharpened points burned blue St. Elmo’s fire, marked him as mageborn.

      The Aisle’s roof was lost in shadow above him, though pin lights of flame delineated the bridges that crossed it on the fourth and fifth levels. The glasslike hardness of the walls picked up the chatter of the launderers working in the basins and streams that meandered along the stone immensity of the open floor; some of them called greetings to him as he passed.

      Fargin Graw’s voice boomed above those homier echoes like flatulent thunder on a summer afternoon.

      “If we’re supporting them, they’d damn well better earn their keep!” He was a big man—Rudy could identify his silhouette against the chilly light that streamed through the passageway between the two sets of open Doors while he was still crossing the last of the low stone bridges over the indoor streams. “And if they’re not earning their keep, which I for one can’t see ‘em doing, then they better find themselves a useful trade or get out! Like some others I could name sitting around getting fat … There’s not a man in the River Settlements who doesn’t get out in the fields and pull his stint at guarding—”

      “And boy, after all day in the fields, they must be just sharp as razors on night-watch.” Rudy hooked his free hand through the buckle of his belt as he came out to join the little group on the Keep’s broad, shallow steps, blinking a little in the pallid brightness of the spring sun.

      Graw swung around angrily, a brick-faced man with the fair hair not often seen in the lands once called the Realm of Darwath, perhaps five years older than Rudy’s thirty years. Janus of Weg, commander of the elite corps of the Keep Guards, hid a smile—he’d lost warriors twice due to the inefficiency of Graw’s farmer militia—and the Lady Minalde, last High Queen of Darwath and Lady of the Keep, raised a hand for silence.

      “Rudy.” Her low, sweet voice was pleasantly neutral in greeting, as if he had not spoken. “Master Graw rode up from the Settlements