"Rudy?" A tousled blond head appeared around the doorway after a perfunctory knock. "M'lord Rudy," the boy hastily amended, and added with a grin, "Hi, Tir. M' lord Rudy, Her Majesty asks if you'd come to the Doors, please. Fargin Graw's giving her a bad time," he added as Rudy reached for his staff and started to rise. "Oh, great." Fargin Graw was someone whose nose Rudy had considered breaking for years. "Thanks, Geppy." "May I go play with Geppy, Rudy?"

"Yeah, go ahead, Ace. If I know Graw, this'll take a while." With Geppy and Tir pelting on ahead of him, Rudy walked down the broad main corridor of the royal enclave-one of the few wide halls in the Keep not to have been narrowed millennia ago by the owners of cells breaking walls to cadge space from the right of way-and down the Royal Stair.

Someone had taken advantage of the draught on the stair and stretched a clothesline across the top of the high archway where the stair let into the Aisle, the black-walled cavern that ran more than three-quarters of the Keep's nearly half-mile length. Rudy ducked under the laundry, scarcely a wizardly figure in his deerskin breeches, rough wool shirt, and gaudily painted bison-hide vest, his dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders. Only his staff, pale wood worn with generations of hand grips and

tipped by a metal crescent upon whose sharpened points burned blue St. Elmo's fire, marked him as mageborn.

The Aisle's roof was lost in shadow above him, though pin lights of flame delineated the bridges that crossed it on the fourth and fifth levels. The glasslike hardness of the walls picked up the chatter of the launderers working in the basins and streams that meandered along the stone immensity of the open floor; some of them called greetings to him he passed.