Mother of Winter. Barbara Hambly

whose power has made him responsible for everyone and everything around him. She saw all the dead whose deaths he had been unable to prevent: his parents, the people he had grown up with in the long-vanished principality of Gyrfire. His student Lohiro, and a woman he had once loved. All the blood-dabbled, shrunken corpses in the streets and courts and alleyways of Gae when the Dark arose.

      Tir’s father, who had been Ingold’s student, patron, and friend.

      “What about shape-shifting?” Gil forced her voice to a rationality she was far from feeling. “Can you do that? Into something like a peregrine? Something that’s fast and big enough to take the regular night cold for a couple hours? I think I can get to Hyve by myself.”

      The haunted look in the blue eyes turned to alarm—at the thought of leaving her to make her own way through the hostile dark of the countryside, Gil was certain, rather than at the hideous risk involved in changing shape and flying under the descending hammer of the coming storm. He hesitated, knowing already he’d have to leave her to her own devices, have to do as she suggested …

      “I’ll be all right.” She added, “It’s not like you have a choice.” Thirty percent of the mages who tried shape-shifting didn’t survive the first attempt, but she knew herself to be speaking the literal truth. In the absence of communication by scrying crystal, there was no other way for the warning to be given, for the lives of the herdkids, every man, woman, and child of the Settlements—the stock—to be saved.

      She could see the calculation fleeting behind his eyes, gauging not the hideous stresses to body, mind, and the ability to use magic, but only how those stresses might best be circumvented. “No,” he said at length. “No.”

      He rose in a single lithe move and made his way half at a run down the brick walk between the marble-faced stalls, shedding as he walked the heavy bearskin surcoat, the rough brown mantle, his face set like stone. Gil, at his heels, felt a sudden blowback of heat, as if she had stepped from the icy night into a summer afternoon: spells gathered around him for protection from the outer cold. Brown leaves in the corners of the broken carriage chamber whirled with the wind of warm air meeting cold, and as Ingold pulled off his boots, laid down his sword belt with a soft ringing of metalwork on brick, fog billowed around him, frailly lit from within by the blue galaxy of magelight above his head.

      He slammed open the crazy stable doors, stepped through into the night, naked and shrouded with swirling cloud. Gil stepped into that core of heat and smoky brilliance, clasped him hard to her: “Watch out,” she whispered.

      “I always do, my dear.” His long white hair lifted in the stirring of the magical warmth, his white beard surprisingly soft against her face, while the muscles of his bare arms were like rock. “Guard the Cylinder,” he said. In the chaos of dark and mist, he seemed little more than a voice, strong arms, eyes that could have been summer stars. An old scar like a time-dimmed furrow marked the point of his shoulder; there was a bump where his collarbone had been broken long ago.

      “If I don’t return, send for Thoth or Kta or one of the powerful mages, for at all costs we must find out what it is and what it does. My child—”

      Their lips met, the passion seldom spoken between them like unexpected flame: the fierce, cold, scholarly woman and the man who feared loving as he feared neither death nor foe.

      She stepped back from him, like stepping through a door into the cold again. Ghostly streams of vapor whirlpooled around him as he lifted his arms and spoke in his great deep broken voice the True Names of the stars. Though she had heard the mages speak of it, Gil had never seen shape-changing; because of its terrible dangers, it was not anything she had ever thought she would see.