The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,125
of sight in the shadows, passing the black-robed figure of Thoth, on his way to give Rudy the news that Eldor was dead.
Chapter Sixteen
They were not able to leave the Keep until some forty-odd hours had passed.
Eldor's body was burned at sunset the following day, on the great meadowland where the dancing had been held for the Winter Feast and where he had first seen Alde in Rudy's arms. Supplies in the Keep did not permit much extravagance in the way of grave-goods-the embroidered coverlet that had been drawn over his body for his lying in state was removed before Thoth called the flames to life within the pyre. Burned at his feet upon the same pyre was Alwir's body, still crumpled together as Gil had left him. With the cold, the rigor had stayed in the corpse. As the flames rushed over both bodies, it was almost as if the Chancellor had prostrated himself to the ground at the feet of the man he had murdered.
Standing in the crowd between Thoth and Brother Wend, Rudy glanced up at the makeshift dais that had been built for the flame thrower demonstration and saw how composed Aide's features were in the scarlet light. Her son was weeping softly in her arms, more from cold or fear of the fire or from the solemnity of the occasion than from any real understanding of what took place. Watching her, Rudy saw something that he had observed with his many sisters: there was a moment when a girl's face changed, took on the indefinable quality of a woman's, and was a girl's no more.
The woman with whom Eldor had barely become acquainted turned from the ashes of his pyre and walked back to the Keep in the deepening gloom. Bishop Maia walked at her side-he had traded his grubby conglomerate of salvaged brocades for the blood-crimson of the official Church and looked for the first time like a Bishop of the Straight Faith instead of a refugee from the Haight-Ashbury. Between them her son toddled, an unrecognizable bundle of furs, and her people walked in solemn silence behind.
Govannin Narmenlion had gone. She had slipped out, some said, at sunrise and made off with a few retainers after the troops of Alketch. Bektis was gone, too, and Rudy suspected that the Bishop had coerced the mage with visions of a double trial for conspiracy and black magic and had gotten him to throw a cloaking-spell over them both.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and conspiracy even stranger ones . He wondered what the Bishop and the Court Mage would find to talk about on the long road south.
That evening he went to bid Alde goodby.
She was in her cell, sitting at the table which she'd cleared as a kind of work space, surrounded by wax tablets, glow-stones, rolls of scribbled palimpsests, and an abacus. She'd tied her hair back in a thick bun at the nape of her neck, and wore the gaudy ski vest he'd made for her over the worn white gown that she'd first had on when he'd met her in Karst and mistaken her for her son's babysitter. He paused in the doorway, watching how the lamplight flickered on the jeweled stylus, on the splinter of silver that gleamed in her hair, and on the little worry wrinkle between her brows that, like Gil's scar, would forever mark her face. He did not know quite how to speak to her, for there was no mistaking her for anything but a Queen now.
Then she looked up and saw him, and happiness kindled in her eyes like the coming of spring. She held out her hands to him, hesitantly, as if she, too, were uncertain of where and how they stood.
"I wasn't sure I'd recognize you," he said.
She smiled. "I'm not sure that I recognize myself."
Gently he drew her to her feet and kissed her lips. It was the kiss of a friend, but she held him from parting from her and returned the kiss of longtime lovers whose love had gone deeper than passion or change or grief. There was tightness and magic in it, like coming home to warm firelight after a sleet-ridden night journey. The sheer joy of being with her again mingled with and magnified the knowledge that whatever happened, he would always have a loyal partner in this odd, quiet woman who ruled the Keep of Dare.
"I've come to tell you I'll be leaving in the morning."