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Everything's situational.”
    Manlike, Rudy shied from the specific. “Well, like if you had only a short time together and had a choice of spending it with this person you loved or being separated from them because of—of something you wanted. Something you wanted more than anything in the world, except them.”
    Gil shook her raveled braid back over her shoulder. “What makes you think you have a choice?”
    Rudy gulped. “Hunh?”
    Her voice was as chilly and neutral as her eyes. “Only a wizard can find the City of Quo, Rudy. Ingold's got the Dark Ones on his trail, God only knows why. He needs another wizard to back him up. If you hadn't volunteered to go looking for the Archmage with him, Rudy, you'd probably have been drafted.”
    A long moment of silence followed, while Rudy digested that one. Love and the loneliness of exile fought in him against the burning memory of that first instant of the knowledge of his own power, the instant he had called forth fire from darkness. The double need in him for love and power seemed to rise over him like the tide, with a confusion of memories: Ingold standing in a shining web of runes; the darkness of Minalde's watching eyes; and the sweep of pearlescent waves washing over a half-buried skill.
    In the end it all meant very little. He would go because it was required of him that he go.
    “You got a great way of putting things, spook,” he muttered tiredly.
    Gil shrugged. “Booklearning,” she explained. “It rots the brain. Get some sleep, punk. You have a long walk in the morning.”
    It was a small and very tired group that gathered on the steps of the Keep three hours later in the gray chill of dawn. Standing, shivering, beside Ingold in the misty snowlight, Rudy reflected to himself that in some cases it was better to have no sleep than too little. As far as he knew, Ingold hadn't been to bed at all. Every time he'd waked up through the confused remainder of the night, he'd seen the old man sitting beside the fire with the demon-smoke of his foul-smelling tea in wreaths around his head, staring into the yellowed chip of crystal he carried, while Gil and the Icefalcon assembled provisions for the journey with their usual silent efficiency.
    After three days of storms, the Vale of Renweth lay bleak and snowbound all around them, a white, rolling sea breaking against the black rocks of the surrounding cliffs. To the west, the shallow trace of the road climbed toward the dark notch of Sarda Pass, almost hidden in roiling gray cloud; to the east, it wound, descending through what a week ago had been sun-tinted meadows of long grass and a scattering of woods, on out of the Vale past the broken bridge of the Arrow Gorge and down to the Dark-haunted lowlands by the Arrow River. Northward the land rose, mile after forested mile, like a fjord between the high cliffs of the Rampart Range and the greater bulk of the Snowy Mountains, to meet the cold meadows of the timberline and the white walls where the glaciers began.
    But around the Keep itself, the ground was clear. Hunks of snow mixed with chopped dirt had been ripped up by the violence of the Dark Ones' assault and lay scattered,
    like the
    
     spew of a frozen volcano, hundreds of feet from the walls. The walls themselves were unmarked, the black gates that had roared like gongs under that power and fury unscratched.
    Winds sneered down the Vale, roaring in the trees. Rudy shivered wretchedly in his damp cloak and wondered if he'd ever be warm again. Beside him, the Ice-falcon was saying to Ingold, “I hope you packed shovels, unless you plan on turning yourselves into eagles and flying over the Pass. Winter's hardly begun and they say Gettlesand across the mountains is buried deep in snow.”
    Even as a rank novice in the arts of wizardry, Rudy knew that few mages would risk changing their being into the being of a beast, and then only under conditions of extreme emergency. But to nonwizards, magic was magic; and from