"Rudy?" Minalde looked across to the young mage who was her lover, seated at a discreet distance with his two colleagues in wizardry out of respect for the sensibilities-religious or political-of the Keep Lords and the Bishop Maia. "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

Rudy Solis shook his head. He, too, had changed, the Icefalcon thought, over the past seven years. Like Gil-Shalos he was an outlander, son of an alien world.

When they had arrived in the train of Ingold the Wizard on the morning following the final destruction of Gae, the Icefalcon had guessed immediately that Gil-Shalos, who now sat beside him in the loose black clothing of the Guards, would survive. He had seen the warrior in her eyes.

Rudy he had not been so sure of. Even after the young man had found in himself the powers of the Wise Ones-powers that evidently did not exist or were not accessible to humans in his own world-the Icefalcon would not have bet the runt of a pot dog's litter on Rudy's survival.

He might do so today, he thought, but not much more. For all that Rudy had been through, under Ingold's tutelage and on his own, like many civilized people he lacked the cutting blade of hardness in his soul.

"I've never heard of anything of the kind," he said. "Neither has Ingold, as far as I know. At least he's never mentioned it to me."

He shook his long dark hair from his eyes, an unprepossessing figure in his laborer's clothes and his vest of brightly painted bison-hide. "When we're done here, I'll contact him and ask."

"It is a most inopportune moment," put in the elderly Lord Ankres dryly, "for Lord Ingold to have absented himself from the Keep." Gil-Shalos stiffened at this slight to the mage who was her lover, her life, and the father of her young son, but as a member of the Guards it was not her place to speak out of turn to one of the Keep Lords. Rudy answered, however.