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found himself literally trembling with rage, overwhelmed with a primal urge to smash the smirking big man's teeth down his throat—not that that would help Alde any.
    Alwir continued pleasantly, “But, you see, it is in my own best interests to protect her reputation, as well as her son's creditability, which scandal would certainly damage. I hope you appreciate my position.”
    What Rudy appreciated, at the moment, was how someone could see red and do murder in blind passion. He fought for calm, then asked, “And what is your position?”
    Alwir raised his brows. “Why, to offer you my protection, of course,” he said, as if the matter were self-evident. But his calculating eyes were on Rudy's face, gauging that startled break in his anger. “To 'cover' for you, as I believe the vulgar say,” the Chancellor went on in a friendly voice, “until you depart from here to return to your own world.”
    Rudy looked stupidly at him, like a man looking at his own spilled guts before it dawned on him that he was dead. Numbed, Rudy could only listen to that smooth, casual voice run on.
    “I can countenance my sister's passion for you, since it harms no one. It does not affect the succession and will in any case soon be at an end. Indeed, I think it good for a woman to have something to occupy her. Though I cannot approve of her actions, of course, it is better than mourning and brooding. And you did, in fact, always intend to make your stay among us temporary, did you not?”
    “Yeah,” Rudy whispered helplessly. Before Quo, he thought. Before the desert. Before I knew what I was, and called fire from cold wood and darkness.
    “Then it is well,” the Chancellor said contentedly. “And when Minalde marries again…”
    “Marries?”
    “She is, after all, only nineteen,” Alwir pointed out suavely. “I should hope, for the sake of your relationship, that you know her well enough to know that she cannot hold power by herself, particularly not in the sort of world which we are now entering. Even after the Dark are defeated, we will face a long war against them. It will be a time when the strong take what they can get. She cannot hold power under those circumstances—but a man could hold it through her.”
    “As you do,” Rudy said bitterly.
    Alwir shrugged. “I am her brother. Naturally, I would prefer that she remain single, but it is hardly fair to her. And I have no intention of letting her develop an affair with someone—wholly unsuitable.”
    Or strong enough to make trouble for you, Rudy thought through a daze of misery. Oh, Christ, Aide, what have I done to put you in his power like this? In helpless rage, he cried, “Why can't you just let her alone?”
    “My dear Rudy.” Alwir chuckled softly. “You must know by this time that those who by their very existence hold power are never let alone by anyone. What have you to lose? I understand that your little affair is temporary and I have no objections to its continuing as such. But what happens after you have left her is no concern of yours. So what will you have lost?”
    Only everything
    
     , Rudy thought, the stunned, empty numbness beginning to give way to a cold despair, like the touch of death upon his bones. Magic and love. Hope. Things that I found after never thinking I would have them. Like a well of inconceivable grief, the future yawned at his feet, the bleak, desolate world of car paint and barflies made a thousand times worse by the awareness of what he would lose. Since he had come to this world, he had often been in fear of death, but this was a fate that he had never even imagined—to be raped of the only two things that mattered in his life and condemned to live on without them in a world where they did not exist, and never had existed.

Chapter Three
    The most beautiful city in the West of the World—that was how Minalde had spoken of Gae.
    A garden, the Icefalcon had called it.
    But the Icefalcon was said to be dead, murdered by the