in the fields—and in huge areas of meadow and woods, both here in Renweth Vale and down by the River Settlements—had become an endemic nuisance, indestructible by any means he or Ingold or anyone else had yet been able to contrive. It would burn after a fashion but grew back within days, even if the dirt it had grown upon were sown with salt, soaked with oil of vitriol at any strength Ingold could contrive, or dug out and heaped elsewhere: the slunch grew back both in the dirt heap and in the hole. It simply ignored magic. It grew. And it spread, sometimes slowly, sometimes with alarming speed.
“How about asking me something simple, like why don’t we get rid of rats in the Keep? Or ragweed pollen in the spring?”
“Don’t you get smart with me, boy,” Graw snapped in his flat, deaf man’s voice. “You think because you sit around reading books and nobody makes you do a hand’s turn of work you can give back answers to a man of the land, but …”
Rudy opened his mouth to retort that until the rising of the Dark, Graw had been a man of the paint-mixing pots in Gae—his wife and sons did most of the work on his acres down in the River Settlements, by all accounts, as they’d done here in the Vale before the nine hundred or so colonists had moved down to the river valleys to found settlements three years ago. But Alde said, still in resolutely friendly, uninflected tones, “I think what Rudy is trying to say is that there are some problems, not amenable to any remedy we know, which have been with us for thousands of years, and that slunch may turn out to be one of them.” The glass-thin breeze from the higher mountain peaks stirred tendrils of her long black hair, fluttering the new leaves of the aspen and mountain laurel that rimmed the woods, a hundred yards from the Keep on its little mound. “We don’t know.”
“The stuff’s only been around for three years,” pointed out Rudy, upon whose toe Alde had inconspicuously trodden.
“And in those three years,” Graw retorted, “it’s cut into the fields we’ve sweated and bled to plant, it’s killed the wheat and the trees on which our lives and the lives of our children depend.” One heavy arm swept toward the farms downslope from the Keep, the fields with their lines of withe separating one plot holder’s land from the next. Like purulent sores, white spots of slunch blotched the green of young wheat in three or four places, the wrinkled white fungus surrounded by broad rings of brown where the grain was dying.
Graw’s mouth clamped into a settled line, and his pale tan eyes, like cheap beads, sliced resentfully between the slim black-haired woman beside him, the young wizard in his painted vest, and the heavy-shouldered, black-clothed shape of the Commander of the Guards, as if he suspected them of somehow colluding to withhold from him the secret of comfort and survival.
“It’s sickening the crops, and if the River Settlements are sending wheat and milk and beasts for slaughter up here to the Keep every year, we’re entitled to something for our sweat.”
“Something more than us risking our necks to patrol your perimeter, you mean?” Janus asked thinly, and Graw scoffed.
“My men can do their own patrolling! What the hell good is it to know about saber-teeth or some bunch of scroungy dooic ten miles from the nearest fields?” He conveniently neglected to mention the warning the Guards had brought him of the White Raiders last winter, or the battle they and the small force of nobles and men-at-arms had fought with a bandit company the autumn before. “But if our labor and our strength are going out to support a bunch of people up here at the Keep who do nothing or next to nothing …” His glance slid back to Rudy, and from him to Alde’s belly, rounded under the green wool of her faded gown.
The Lady of the Keep met his eye. “Are you saying then that the Settlements Council has voted to dispense with sending foodstuffs to the Keep in return for patrols by the Guards and advice from the mages who live here?”
“Dammit, we haven’t voted on anything!” snapped Graw, who, as far as Rudy knew, wasn’t even on the Settlements Council. “But as a man of the land whose labor is supporting you, I have the right to know what’s being done! Not one of your wizards has come down to have a look at my fields.”
“The slunch is different down there?”
“Thank you very much for coming to us, Master Graw.” Minalde’s voice warmed as she inclined her head. As Graw made a move to stride toward the Keep, she added, with impeccably artless timing, “And I bid you welcome to the Keep, you and your riders, and make you free of it.”
He halted, his jaw tightening, but he could do no more than mutter, “I thank you, lady. Majesty,” he added, under the cool pressure of that morning-glory gaze. He glared at Rudy, then jerked his hand at the small band of riders who’d accompanied the herd of tribute sheep up the pass. They fell in behind him, bowing awkward thanks to Alde as they followed him up the shallow black stone steps and vanished into the dark tunnel of the Doors.
Rudy set his jaw, willing the man’s hostility to slide off him like rain.
In a sweet voice trained by a childhood spent with relentless deportment masters, Minalde said, “One of these days I’m going to break that man’s nose.”
“Y’ want lessons?” Janus asked promptly, and they all laughed.
“Why is it,” Minalde asked with a sigh, later, as she and Rudy walked down the muddy path toward the Keep farms, “that one always hears of spells that will turn people into trees and frogs and mongrel dogs, but never one that will turn a … a lout like that into a good man?”
Rudy shrugged. “Maybe because if I said, ‘Abracadabra, turn that jerk into a good man,’ there’d be no change.” He shook his head. “Sheesh. I’ve been around Ingold too long.”
She laughed and touched his hand. His fingers fitted with hers as if designed to do so at the beginning of time. The farms—which, contrary to Graw’s assertions, were in fact the chief business of the Keep, and always had been—were far enough from the walls that wizard and lady could walk handfast without exacerbating the sensibilities of the conservative. Everyone knew that the Keep wizard’s pupil was the lady’s lover and the father of the child she carried, but it was a matter seldom mentioned: the religious teachings of a less desperate age died hard.
“You’re going to have to go down there, you know,” Alde said in time.
“Now?”
Their eyes met, and she rested her free hand briefly on the swell beneath her gown. “I think so,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s the second or third time he’s been up here, demanding that something be done about slunch. He has a lot of influence in the Settlements, not with the nobles, but with the hunters, and some of the farmers. If he broke away from Keep rule, he’d probably turn bandit himself. The child isn’t due for another two months, you know.”
Rudy knew. Though he’d helped to birth dozens of babies in the five years he’d been Ingold’s pupil, the thought of Alde being brought to bed while the master wizard was still on the road somewhere terrified him.
With Alde, it was different.
The Lady of the Keep. The widow of the last High King. Tir’s mother.
The mother of the child that would be his.
The thought made him shiver inside, with longing and joy and a strange disbelief. He’d be a father. That child inside her—inside the person he most loved in the whole of his life, the whole of two universes—was a part of him.
Involuntarily—half kiddingly, but half not—he thought, Poor kid. Some gene pool.
And yet …
Under the all-enveloping bulk of her quilted silk coat she barely showed, even this far along. But she had the glowing beauty he’d seen in those of his sisters who’d married happily and carried children by the men who brought them joy. Ingold had early taught him the spells that wizards lay upon their consorts to keep them from conceiving, but she had pleaded with him not to use them. Nobody in the Keep talked about their lady carrying a wizard’s child, but even Bishop Maia, usually tolerant despite the Church’s official