Icefalcon’s Quest

“Tomorrow afternoon?”

She whispered again, “Thank you.” Her small hands closed around Rudy’s brown, cold fingers, seeking reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn’t touched the tisane Linnet had brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.

I’d better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack. She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis’ jeweled weapon, either.

How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer had up his fur-lined sleeves?

But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. “Damn,” she said.

Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy’s where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up sharply at the note in the girl’s voice. “What is it?”

“I …” Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light. “Damn,” she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. “There’re men coming up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men – horses – spears glittering in the moonlight …”

“What?” Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae’s shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. “Where?”

“They’ve just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents.” She looked up into the Lady’s face with baffled eyes. “It’s hard to see in darkness, but I think they’re black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta Islands with gold beads in their hair. They’re coming fast.”

Alde cursed, something she seldom did. “Send for Janus,” she said. “We need to meet them at the Tall Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae …”

Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit watchroom of the Guards.

The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis’ camp through the night, turn and turn about with hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostly in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World. He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.