Fortress of Dragons

INTERLUDE

The drifts were melting, under a clear blue sky and a blazing bright sun, the wondrous change in the weather that had come the very day Cefwyn left his prayers. Some more hopeful and pious folk called it a miracle.

The soldiers at the rear of the column, less reverent, cursed the mud.

And in the matter of miracles, particularly those of his own invocation, Cefwyn was dubious, but he gladly took the good fortune he had, praised the gods in solemn thanksgiving before the whole court, as the people praised their lately pious king.

For himself, he wondered whether Emuin and Tristen had had a hand in the weather, and whether the change indeed presaged a turn in his luck from a completely different source.

Whatever the source and whatever the meaning some might find in it, sunshine was certainly better than gray skies for an omen of setting-forth: the road, which progressively turned from white to brown under the feet of men and horses, still was frozen hard enough to prevent the cart wheels from bogging down. That was miracle enough to encourage any soldier’s hope of success in the enterprise.

Cefwyn rode his warhorse, Kanwy, whose big feet made his own way, no matter the weather, and Ninévrisë rode a gray mare likewise of the heavy horse breed, whose sure back and steady disposition made her safer for a lady in her delicate condition, in Cefwyn’s estimation.

Behind them came the muster of the Guelens, and those of the Dragon Guard unit which had served the city. Part of the Prince’s Guard had come as well, men who had accompanied him to Amefel in the summer, and who were now lent by his brother Efanor, along with their commander, Gwywyn, lately commander of the Dragons under their father. The rest of Panys had marched, no doubt there. Young Rusyn brought the rest of their muster to join his father, Lord Maudyn, and his elder brother. Marisal was coming: Cefwyn had their lord’s word. And likewise Sulriggan’s province of Llymaryn would come, so he had Sulriggan’s early and extravagant promise.

It was less than the army he had envisioned, but not the calamity he had envisioned, either. Move they did, and now all the other lords, from Marisal to Isin, had to reconsider their positions: stand aside in avowed cowardice or in support of Ryssand, or take to the roads and go to the riverside. Tardiness would not serve. Llymaryn had used up that excuse in the last war.

Gods bless the mayor of Guelemara, too, who had sent his house guard, all five of them, but it was symbolic. Guelemara’s various lords had sent the rest, and so Efanor stood vindicated in fact and not only in name. Gods bless Panys, never slow to answer the call to arms, and gods bless Marisal, a man of honor, who had stood by his king at an hour when the list of loyal names had been far shorter than it had grown to be.

So the army was on the road, not, again, as Cefwyn had envisioned, as a tide of men marching down a green-sided road, but still with a warm sun beating down and heating armor despite the lingering chill from the snow around them, a sun melting snowbanks and filling the smallest depressions with foot-dampening snowmelt.

It had not been practical to delay to bring Marisal up to the capital before going on to the riverside. It was not practical for any of the rest to muster there and then march west, when the road directly from the provinces was shorter, and he refused to ask it merely for show. At a certain point pageantry was very well for confidence, but practicality said that they should save their wagon axles the added stress and save their marching strength for speed through enemy land.

So in this somewhat gradual gathering of force, let the other duchies ask themselves whether their neighbors might by now have joined the army, and ask themselves was the list of abstainers and the tardy growing shorter by the day, leaving them conspicuously exposed to blame?

He had waited for no debate in council, only declared what conclusion he had reached after his fasting and prayer: he would march at once and asked for the lords to move as quickly to honor their oaths and come with him.

Rusyn had not hesitated a heartbeat. Hard behind him came

Marisal and Llymaryn, and after that the timid and the traitorous had toed the ground and said, well, of course, and yes, they understood the gods’ leading, but it was difficult to muster on such short notice, and they were not at all glad of a war or sanguine of the outcome…

But dared they let the king go to certain death and the kingdom then go to ruin? Dared they be the laggards, when others were going?

Ryssand had not even gotten his chance to speak—had protested and tried to outshout his king, regarding dire news from the south, by no means his wisest course, for he had lost dignity by it, and moreover, the new Patriarch was on his king’s side. Jormys in his new robes of office had come to the dais to declare a holy mission against a sorcerous usurper, a defiler of his oaths of fealty and a despiser of the gods.

The accusations against Tasmôrden were all true, Cefwyn was sure. But the refusal of his king to hear his case sent Ryssand from the hall in blackest fury, and without consulting Efanor he snatched his daughter Artisane up and left the capital without informing his king whether he would march.

He left rumors behind him of sorcerous alliances, a royal bastard among the Aswydds under the malevolent influence of the lord of Amefel, who held court swathed in ill-omened black, kept a familiar about him in the shape of an owl, and had reestablished Althalen as his capital.

It was, perhaps, too much for the populace to hear at once. They were celebrating the rumor of Her Grace bringing forth an heir… a rumor that had had days to run before Ryssand blurted out wild charges of bastardy in the south. The Aswydds were no part of the people’s experience or recollection. The people had the evidence of a child within the bounds of marriage, a king who had fasted and prayed and emerged blessed by the Quinalt, with all pomp and pageantry and calling for holy war against a godless enemy. The people heard the blare of trumpets, saw the muster of troops and colors, and Ryssand’s departure went all but unremarked, except as one more movement of lord and guards in a town that saw many lords and many companies.

If he had failed to rally the entire army, so had Ryssand failed to draw his supporters after him… for they were caught in confu-sion and doubted where their best advantage might be. The rumor of Tarien’s child was unleashed, and far from shocking: it was over the horizon, beyond the border, far away, and young princes committed indiscretions, but the king had married and gotten at least the whisper of an heir. Her Grace riding through the streets found cheers, now, and doubtless scrutiny to see whether she showed signs of her condition, which meant prosperity to a year, to crops, to flocks, to gold and fortune. If there was disapproval of her now, it was that she rode… la! she rode astride. It was not appropriate. The king should put his foot down and protect the people’s heir, and by no means take Her Grace near a battlefield…

Yet she was the Lady Regent, and noble, and noblewomen did such inexplicable things, being made of other stuff than the commons: she rode with authority, and gained cheers as they passed out of the town, and childless women ran up to touch her skirts, which attested how the people believed, both in her condition, and in her royalty, gods-sanctioned to spread blessings.

Ryssand had never counted on the Royal Consort’s being with child, never counted on a potential heir between Efanor, Artisane’s ambition, and the throne—never counted on the Quinalt-sanctioned potency of a king’s turn to piety and fatherhood. And he had lost his bearings, lost his opening, lost all momentum, and found himself in possession of two houseguests, his chief witnesses, Cuthan and Parsynan, both now linked to Tasmôrden, Amefel, and sorcery.

“How do you fare?” Cefwyn asked, glancing at Ninévrisë, who sat bundled in furs on the mare’s broad back. He thought he detected discomfort in her shifting about. At the last rest the party had taken she had moved stiffly, and if there was one thing not to his satisfaction in the whole business it was exactly what the people found not to their satisfaction: Ninévris딑s insistence on riding with him. “We can rest again if you like.”

“No,” she said.

She had ridden with him to the battle against Aséyneddin. She had shown sober good sense in the councils of his officers, where her opinion was worth hearing, and she had taken command of the camp without a demur, keeping that in order and keeping herself out of unwarranted danger. In that sense, riding with him to war was safer than staying in the capital without him.

But the conditions were not the same. Her condition was not the same.

“You’re frowning,” he said.

“It’s the months of sitting that’s the matter. It’s four months stitching silly little flowers.”

“All the same…”

“I hate little flowers! I don’t want them on my gowns!”

“Four months sitting in a chair,” he said, and felt sympathy for the discomfort of the saddle. He had his own share of it. “Sitting and signing and sealing and signing and sealing. I have forests I’ve never seen. Lands I’ve never ridden.”

“You could have taken time.”

“And left you to Artisane?” That conjured too grim thoughts: Brugan dying at the foot of the Guelesfort stairs, and he chased off to other subjects. “No. The dog-boys have the hounds to run: I’ve even given them a pony, to exercise the dogs at the chase and keep up… gods know, maybe this summer we’ll hunt…” But that was wrong, too. Ninévrisë would not share the sport. She would miss all the summer, and stitch little flowers amid the likes of Artisane and Luriel… while he…

He grieved at the thought, he discovered. He was appalled to know he was jealous of the child—but he had wished a little time to themselves. He had imagined a year, two, perhaps, for the two of them to be lovers, before the dynastic ambitions of their two nations invaded their bed. Everyone in the kingdom wanted to know the particulars of his wife’s condition, and all his courtiers looked at her for every sign of increased girth.

Now they rode out: they leapt from war to war and not a summer to themselves, not even the leisure to grow a child in peace.

But today she had the kiss of the sun on her face, and managed the gray mare with a fine hand, no matter the discomfort of the ride. There was a liveliness in her this morning that he never wanted quenched, no matter the demands others set on them—and he had not seen that fire burn again in her until she was on horseback and under the open sky.

Perhaps she saw the same change in him, mirror into mirror. In the still-snowy land, in the muster of the forces, he found this was a moment to catch, one of those jewel moments of a lifetime to store away against the ravages of enemies and the chances of war.

Wrong to risk coming with him? Wrong not to stay in Guelemara, when her own people’s welfare was at risk, in all of this, and Elwynim who thought there was no choice might yet rally to her banner if they saw it?

They were riding out in hope of everything. They might gain. They might lose. Not being sure of either, they were free as birds… and he might have won his struggle. He might finally have won… for Ryssand had gone and no one had followed: he had boldly set Ryssand the challenge the recalcitrants never once seemed to have expected of a son of his father: march with the army, obey now or be forsworn.

And now did Ryssand’s neighbor Isin have second thoughts in his support of Ryssand, and did Nelefreissan, and did the others of the north? They were the martial barons, the warlike, hard north, and had Ryssand miscalculated? No, of course the king was not supposed to have done what he had done. The king was supposed to act modestly and responsibly and take no such risks with his life and the succession—in short, the king should play their game with their dice, by the rules Ryssand dictated moment by moment. His father had. Would not he?

The king’s consort, moreover, surely would stay in the hands of women of the baronial households, in reach of retribution, and needed their support to have any comfort at all—therefore, the king would be cautious.

She had certainly thrown that to the winds—and now lords who had been entirely unwilling to place Ninévrisë’s future children in the line of succession now complained she was endangering a king’s child with her riding.

The petticoats had never concerned the lords; this did.

Her Grace must take care, old Isin had been bold enough to say, frowning as he saw Ninévrisë ahorse at their riding out. Surely, if nothing else, a carriage…

“Thank you, sir,” Ninévrisë had returned gaily, riposte and straight to the heart of northern pride, “but I rode to Lewen field with the king and will not desert my husband now.”

Ah, such a look as Isin had had when she said those words about deserting.

And the army such as the town contained had stood gathered in the square before the great Quinaltine, with the bright brave show of banners, and the sound of bells ringing, and the trumpets blaring—with all that in the air, could hearts a little less selfish than Ryssand’s not be moved?

At the very last moment before they rode out, the lord of Osanan had come to him, afoot like some peasant farmer, pushing his way through the line of Dragon Guard as he sat Kanwy back and the martial trumpets shivered the air in the Quinaltine square.

“Gods for Ylesuin!” the Duke of Osanan had shouted from among the last screen of guardsmen, the old battle cry. “Osanan will be there, Your Majesty!”

Cefwyn believed it, and indeed, before they had cleared the town gates, Osanan’s standard-bearer had come, in earnest of his lord. Osanan had a far ride home and the mustering of his men, in order to recover his standard, but that pebble was suddenly in motion.

Ryssand’s edifice of pride had crumbled that little bit more, at the stirring of an old warhorse’s heart.

Cefwyn gazed ahead of him now, with the heavy flap and snap of the royal banners in his ears, his, and Ninévrisë’s colors flying before them. It was his order to display those banners all the way to the river and beyond, to show them in every village as they gathered that ragtag of peasantry that would come to their sovereign’s call along the way.

They moved up the long road that passed ultimately through Murandys itself, bound for the bridge that would take them across the Lenúalim and commit them once and for all to keeping his promise to his bride. And the sun shone down on them as they began.

But toward noon, the east shadowed horizon to horizon with cloud, and by midafternoon it was clear that weather-luck was only for their setting-forth.

Soldiers grumbled, seeing rain in the offing.

But the wind that blasted down as the cloud came was bitter cold, buffeting the standards and making it clear that rain was not the threat.

“So, well,” Ninévrisë said cheerfully, bringing up her hood. The first snowflakes stood unmelted in her dark hair, and her face bore a wind-stung blush. “It will be better than mud, will it not?”

“So much for weather-luck and fasting,” Cefwyn said, so only she heard.

And in very little time winter enfolded them: the sky grew leaden and the air turned gray with flying snow.

“If Tristen managed this,” Cefwyn said across the voice of the wind, “could he not have managed to hold the sunshine just until we crossed the river?”

CHAPTER 1

The weather turned back to brutal cold, troubling in itself: Tristen saw it coming on the afternoon after Anwyll’s departure and no wish he could make brought back the sun. Gray cloud closed in, and bitter wind, and the drifts lately melted froze hard, a fine dust of snowflakes blowing across it at first, then sticking, with a night’s greater fall. And days subsequent were no better.

Beeswax candles by the score lit master Emuin’s studies, meanwhile, candles to light the crabbed note-taking that had gone on at any moment of every day, every night. Drafts swept through the tower and down into the guardroom on rare clear nights, and by that, Tristen knew master Emuin peered into the heavens despite his promises to observe the wards and keep the shutters closed.

On the obscured nights there were no such drafts: then Emuin delved into old texts, and by dawn and dusk sent Paisi on this and that mysterious errand to the archive and to the Bryalt shrine, after which the nuns, too, came with texts.

It was precise times master Emuin avowed he sought, the times of Tristen’s arrival here, of Tarien’s baby’s likeliest conception, and of other events months and even centuries past.

Most of all master Emuin sought the very hour of Mauryl’s Summoning him. Emuin had guessed it, by gross reckoning, as the first day of spring, but the precision and the sure reckoning—that was the chimera Emuin stalked through the old records, through guardhouse accounts and even Cook’s recollections of his arrival: with so many grandchildren to her credit, and the duties she had regarding festivals and solemnities, Cook had a sense of dates and birthdays and feast days, and preserved a better reckoning in her head than the archives did on paper, regarding some events.

All this, Emuin said, was to determine the most auspicious day— and the least—for Cefwyn’s son to be born, while the weather raged in rebellion outside the windows.

Books, anecdotes, the stars: such were Emuin’s sources, as Emuin sought understanding in ways Tristen himself could not have done— for one thing because nothing of Emuin’s knowledge had ever Unfolded to him, and for another because he had not thought to ask the questions Emuin asked. He felt the impulse to magic and chose his moments by some reading of the insubstantial wind of the gray space, while a wizard reckoned and reckoned and consumed ink and paper and kept records it had never remotely occurred to him to keep.

But to know in advance that a moment was coming… this seemed valuable, if one could. He sometimes failed to know what men might do, as he had failed to know how the soldiers would behave when he dismissed them; and in this Emuin surpassed him. So, too, Emuin professed to him, could any wizard: hence wizards had bested the Sihhë-lords in the past: let it be a lesson to you, Emuin said.

To know when a thing had been in the past was not quite as useful as to know when it would be in time to come, but Emuin could tell him that, too, and fit together the scattered accounts of the Red Chronicle and the Bryalt account. He had read them, read every history he could find—but he had had no awareness of time at the first of his reading and still had a faltering grasp of it. The better part of an hour could slip past while he fed the birds. He could still grow fascinated by some new question and chase it through convolutions, unhearing while one of his advisors spoke to him, patiently telling him what he doubtless did need to know.

In sum, the same faults he had had at the beginning he had, though in lesser measure, and he tried to mend them, where he saw them. He tried to give Emuin answers to his questions now, for instance, since he had been there and Emuin had not been entirely aware of Mauryl’s doings, but his own beginnings in particular were a haze to him, and he retained only few keen impressions of that hour—or rather he retained them all, but not the ones Emuin wished.

He recalled fire—his senses had all been overwhelmed by fire… and he recalled pain: he still bore a scar on his finger. He remembered getting that.

But most of all, the more he needed to remember the structure by which Men reckoned time, the more keenly he remembered the unbridled extravagance of those days, fire which had never seemed brighter, air which had moved over his skin with a touch like fingers, dusty stone underfoot which had had a texture so curious and so smooth… and, oh, the rain, and the thunder… the tastes, the smells, all these things that had poured in on his senses, new and wonderful and commanding his utter attention—to Mauryl’s distress.

But on what night of all nights this had happened, he had no recollection at all, nor any sense how many suns had risen and set before he first beheld the forest outside Ynefel’s walls, or how much of a season had passed before he knew the source of that sighing of leaves which rose to the winds outside the fortress walls.

After he had learned the world from the loft he had known day and night as related to the sun, but he had not known how to count the days—it had never occurred to him that days had a number, or that they would be different one from the other. As a consequence only certain days stood out like signposts, significant to him later, in terms of what would come, but then only days like other days, when miracles of dust and wings and sunlight were all one long vision.

That such times and movements of the stars had been important to Mauryl while he was watching pigeons in the loft, oh, that he could well believe now. He recalled every detail of Mauryl’s presence at the sole table. Their dinners had always competed with the charts and the inkpots for room, and he had read none of them, but he recalled how they looked.

And that Emuin, with his books and his charts and his reports from Gran Sedlyn on Lady Tarien’s condition could fix one date above others as the time for the child to be born, he could also believe, for he had learned there was a regularity in the heavens beyond the simple repetition of day and night and full moon and new—but he could not help Emuin in the reckoning.

That Orien Aswydd also knew these things he was not wholly certain, for he had never associated her with charts and scribing— and that she might not know the complexities as well as Emuin… that failed to comfort him. It reminded him instead that she had relied on an outside source. Having the gift, lacking skill and learning—she had used the gift and listened to whispers from the gray space, whispers which might have told her all those things a better wizard might cipher for himself, whispers which had counseled her to do things which a better wizard would fear even to contemplate.

And that same source of advice was likely at least in the conception of the child—if she lacked it now, as they strongly hoped she did, it meant that her advisor was no longer in the world of Men and had not been since Lewenbrook, but they did not rely on that belief.

She might be cast adrift, ignorant of seasons; but she might have known from the beginning when the child had to be born; or the child might have that knowledge within himself—nothing told him how children knew their time, he, who had been Summoned whole from the fire of a hearth.

Certainly Orien would resist any time of Emuin’s choosing. That went without saying.

Meanwhile Tarien, who contained the subject of all Master Emuin’s reckoning and Orien’s wishing, sat with her sister in the apartment that had been Cefwyn’s—there was troubling irony in that choice—and stitched and stitched patterns in linen.

So Tristen observed. He visited them daily since the weather had turned contrary, not that he found their presence pleasant, but that he wished them to know he thought of them constantly, with all that meant. And always when he visited, it was the stitching that occupied them.

They were spells, he was sure, these squares of black thread on white, these growing structures like ebon snowflakes. It was a marvelous skill they had, a mystery in itself, but what these things meant, Emuin said he did not know.

Was this the wish for snow, that made their movement of men and supplies so difficult? Did it exist, worked in thread?

And while Orien remained a creature of edges and angles and angers, Tarien waxed like the moon toward full.

They stitched in his presence, while by day and night the wizard that was Orien Aswydd prowled the confines of their condition like a wolf before the fold and wished for freedom and rule.

They stitched, and wore their cherished jewels only for each other’s benefit. They had two fine gowns which did little to recover the glory of their appearance in the summer. They dressed in costly cloth in the isolation of their prison, and Orien chose dark Aswydd green against which her skin showed stark, unhealthy white. Her cropped hair flew like a fire about her face, and she took no pains with it, while Tarien wore hers loose, and her laces loose. She only grew more silent, less responsive to his visits, until on the most recent visit she did not respond at all.

They stitched and whenever he came near the wizard that was within Tarien turned and shifted and turned again, innocent and restless, not yet wanting freedom.

But when he was not present, Tarien did speak. She was impatient and full of tempers and storms, so the servants swore… so the midwife Gran Sedlyn swore, in the one report he had had directly from her lips: the old woman, Paisi’s gran, white-haired and portly, reported most to Emuin, and came and went without fuss.

But Gran Sedlyn hung trinkets about the Aswydds’ door: that he saw, and found some foreign virtue in them. He did not oppose them, seeing they strengthened, rather than weakened, the wards, by however little. The sight of them reassured the guards who stood by that door, as his invisible wards did not, and he wished those wards stronger than they were.

And still the weather stayed bitter cold, spitting snow until the drifts piled deep, and the wind howled about the eaves of the fortress at night, rattling shutters and prying at every edge and nook and cranny.

That, he most distrusted. Unlike Ynefel, which had creaked and complained at the wind’s assault, the Zeide stood strong and resistant, but he heard the wind’s attempts at the roof slates and in his rare dreams he heard it prowling about, looking for weaknesses. It grew bold, and he knew Orien wished counter to his wishes.

For the first time in his memory, he counted days… for the letters, his and Aeself’s, would just be arriving.

In the same number of days, the southern army was ready and past ready to move, awaiting only the break in the weather that as yet his wishes could not gain them.

In the same set of days, the child was approaching birth—soon, now, the midwife said.

Crissand declared he brooded too much, and urged him to go riding… though Crissand himself was busy now with the army, with his lands, with his men, and had no dearth of things to occupy him: and dared he ride out, himself, and leave Orien unguarded in the way that only he and Emuin could watch her?

That was foolishness indeed.

So he waited. And he fed the pigeons.

Until the day when Paisi came to interrupt his breakfast, and to beg his presence in the tower—”As master wishes to speak wi’ Your Grace,” Paisi said with a bow, gasping for breath the while. The boy rarely walked anywhere, but this was uncommon haste.

“I’ll come immediately.” And to Uwen who sat at breakfast with him: “No need. I’ll take the guard. Feed the pigeons, will you? They expect it.”

“Aye,” Uwen promised him, and would, as he did, some mornings—indeed, all through the town, so the rumor came to him, the townsfolk had taken to feeding them—for luck, they said, calling them the lord’s birds. There was certainly no starvation on his windowsill, but they had their rights.

Even on a day when Emuin might have an answer for him.

He threw on his cloak in the chance that master Emuin had had the shutters thrown wide and hurried on Paisi’s heels, following Paisi’s quick steps until his own breaths came hard, to what he hoped was the news Emuin had been looking for all these days.

The tower was warm, ablaze with light from all the sconces and from the fire. The table was even in moderate order, the parchments stacked, the inkpots capped.

“Master Emuin?” Tristen said, and unfastened the cloak.

“A date,” Emuin said in triumph, and laid a chart atop the other charts, beginning at once to talk to him about the measuring of the heavens, and the calculations of the moon and its motions and the planets’ travels through the Great Year.

It was doubtless the proof—useless words, at least to his understanding of it, but he saw that Emuin had arrived at his answer, and he dutifully observed what Emuin showed him, a crooked finger tracing the results on parchment.

“This is the reckoning of the year past,” Emuin said, “and here’s the hour of Lewenbrook, and here is the day, the very day I’ll wager Aséyneddin looked to provoke his battle—I had not reckoned this, well, well, lying senseless at the time. But this is the day he would have wanted. But Cefwyn roused his troops out and came for him before things were advantageous to Aséyneddin.—And here’s the hour Hasufin would have chosen on the day the battle did take place: noon, the very exactitude of noon; but noon he did not have, because Cefwyn pressed him… and you did, gods, yes, you did, having a sense about such things, and never needing ink and pen.”

“It was Cefwyn who led,” Tristen said. “Cefwyn who chose the time.”

Emuin blinked at him. “But you agreed, did you not? You were there. You urged him forward.”

“I went with him, like his soldiers.”

“To Aséyneddin’s ruin.” Emuin seemed a little put out by his dismissal of any part he had had in choosing the hour of the battle— but truthfully, Tristen thought, it seemed to him that all of them had rushed toward it. Even the horses had taken a fever for battle, pace quickening until the thunder rolled through the earth.

Had he guided the hour? Had he wished the horses faster and faster on that morning? Had he willed axles not to break on days before and all that army hastened into each day’s gain of ground?

It appalled him if he had done so, not knowing: he thought not.

But if not he, then who?

Emuin’s finger traveled back and back through the spidery notes. “Here, the night of your arrival in Henas’amef; I had it from the guard records—my memory I thought was exact, but this has the very hour, as they marked it against the glass. And here, the date of a gift of mine to the Bryaltine shrine… they write down such things. Still not precise. The guard is never precise, and the Bryalt abbot has been known to err, but on this matter, I think not, and not both of them together. ‘Twill serve. ‘Twill serve. This was the hour.”

“Of my coming here?”

“Why should it matter? Why should it matter, you ask? Because that hour was momentous for your presence, young lord, but not only that. Not only that! In that hour, in that selfsame hour, was this babe’s conception. I have my sources among the maids… not the moment, alas! but at least a time within three hours.”

“That night?”

“Before Cefwyn came down the stairs to answer my summons, and would I’d given it earlier—or perhaps I would not.” Emuin gave a wave of his hand much as if he brushed away a gnat. “We never can guess what might have been. What is, is, and that’s what we know. What will be is a fine pursuit, but fraught with too damned many possibilities. Fortune-telling, I tell you, is not what it’s surmised to be. But here the child was conceived, in the very room where he’ll be born—dare you call that placement utter coincidence, eh?”

“It’s a fine room. It was vacant.”

“Ah, yes. Of course. Perfectly ordinary. Damn, but these things fit together! Nothing out of the way at all. And on this day, and on this hour…” Emuin showed him the intersection of a half a score arcs and lines, and suddenly shuffled to another parchment. “This was the hour of your birth, do you see? This was Mauryl’s best moment, as I reckon it, the new moon, the moon of beginnings! It was the earliest moon of spring, and I think near Mauryl’s own moment: the hour of his own birth, perhaps, however long ago, or the hour when he had most to hope for success of his enterprise. This, above all others, was your hour to come back into the world… so this day may have been yours already, a natal day, a day of accession, of some auspicious moment in the life you had once. It was your point of correspondence to him, do you see? And no accident that that was so! Hence, your power in this venture! On that, Mauryl relied—as he did in our venture at Althalen, that night, that bloody night.” Emuin’s hand trembled, and moved on among the arcs and bird-track scribings. “There, there, was Hasufin’s last death, the realm’s rise; your birth; perhaps Mauryl’s, all the same day! do you see? And if Hasufin had lived this long, to see this Year of Years—” Again Emuin’s hand moved, to the end of the chart. “—at this hour, that midnight of Midwinter Eve, he would have worked a Working to bind the next age. He failed!”

“Did we?”

Emuin looked distraught, as if that had been the wrong question. “What do you expect of me? I’m a wizard, not born to magic!”

“Forgive me.”

“But you set your seal on this age. You. Yourself. You’re still here.” Emuin searched amid the stack of parchments, discarding one and the other in increasing frustration, until he had disordered all of it. Then: “Aha! This. This is your answer, young lord. This is your new age. This, this day is where we are now. And that babe—that babe of Tarien’s—is on both charts, one for his conception, one for his birth. Follow this arc.”

Tristen observed, such as he could, the arcane notes. They were all measures of risings and settings.

“And this is your Day in this new cycle of years, this is your beginning—” Emuin’s gnarled finger traveled to an intersection. “And we have a babe about to be born. Tell me what you think the hour will be.”

Tristen moved his finger toward the intersection of lines Emuin said was his own, and hesitated, for there was a double set of lines— ominously so, to his unlettered perception. He stared at that coincidence of lines, with not a notion in the world what the numbers signified, or which was which, but all that was within him telling him there was something to fear here.

“Just so,” Emuin said, and so stood back from the charts—cast a measuring rod down atop them as if they had become negligible to all further reckonings. “Just so. One for midnight, one for dawn. And to that end I’ve asked Gran Sedlyn to reckon very carefully and keep me advised down to the hour of her estimations, never forgetting wizardry’s in question here. Wish, young lord! Wish the world to your own measure. Wish the babe for any hour but midnight and any day of the year but Hasufin’s. Wish the heavens to speed the spring and melt the snow so we can be done with this wretched war. Wish a speedy delivery of this child by daylight. And wish Cefwyn well, when you do all these things.”

“I do,” he said fervently. “Above all, I do that.”

CHAPTER 2

The storm wind came in the night and howled around the eaves and rattled shutters, a new wind, from a different direction, and singing with a different sound, on this, the night before the anniversary of his first night in the world. Tristen sat up in bed and listened, feeling no threat in it, hearing no ominous voice in it, only the banging of a shutter somewhere distant.

Thunder cracked.

That, he thought, sounded more like rain than snow, and he rose from bed, flung on a robe, and went out to the heart of his apartments, already feeling the air warmer than the bone-deep chill of recent days.

Lightning flared in the seam of the draperies before he touched them. He parted them, and with a loud boom of thunder, light blazed down the clear sides of the windows, lit the Aswydd heraldry in colored glass in the center of the window and flashed repeatedly, bringing the dragons within it to fitful life, casting shadows about the room.

Rain spattered the panes, spotting the colored glass, glistening beads on the clear side panes. Lightning lit the adjacent roofs, and the rain came down hard. Droplets, lightning-lit, crawled down the glass.

In the same way rain had come to Ynefel and made crooked trails over the horn panes of his small window.

So the thunder had walked above Ynefel’s broken roofs, and the trees outside the walls had sighed with hundreds of voices. Balconies had creaked and beams had moved. Shadows ran along the seams of the stones.

But there in Ynefel he had not known Uwen’s presence… as now there was approaching behind his back a very sleepy Uwen, drawn by the sound of the storm, stumbling faithfully from his bed. Emuin, too, was awake at this recasting of the weather, and Paisi had waked, as Tarien and Orien had, as all through the fortress and the town and the camps sleepers waked to the wind and the rain and the thunder that heralded another turn in the fickle, wizard-driven weather.

Uwen came, blanket-cloaked, past the shadows of brazen dragons the lightning made lively with repeated flashes as Tristen looked back at him. Uwen had his hair loose: he raked at it, but achieved little better. In outline he looked like Emuin at his untidiest.

“South wind,” Uwen said, and so it was. “It don’t sound that cold.”

“It doesn’t feel cold,” Tristen said, turning to put his hand on the glass. As he had gone to bed, frost had patterned the panes. Now these meandering streams of water cast crooked shadows against the lightning.

A prodigious crack of thunder made him jump.

—Rain on the horn-paned window. A hole in the roof of the loft.

—A hole in the Quinaltine roof. Fatal anger of the barons, a threat to Cefwyn that did not go away.

“Oh, ‘at were a good ‘un,” Uwen said. “This is a warmin’ rain, this is.”

Spring was back. He had gained it once and now gained it back again, as if all influence to the contrary had waned and on this night he reached his ascendancy.

He had all but come full circle now, past sunset and into the night. Morning would bring the anniversary of his beginning, the evening hours, the precise hour of his own origin, likely at sundown.

Tomorrow night, Emuin had said the birth of Tarien’s child would be most portentous… and now the weather turned.

He listened for disturbance in the gray space, but Tarien’s child slept quietly in his mother’s womb this stormy night—a week and more away from entering the world, so Gran Sedlyn insisted. It might not, then, happen tomorrow, on that date Emuin called portentous: there were no signs of it happening, and Tarien’s time Tristen understood could not be rushed, even by wizardry: the babe was as the babe was, and at the moment it seemed quiet.

So the Zeide, too, rested quietly, anxious as these days were for him.

One more day before the dreaded day.

He had feared the day of his birth as long ago this fall, wondering Would the wizardry that had brought him forth from the dark give him yet another year. When he had feared that, he had had no imagining even of winter and all it might bring. Now for all his dread, he was indeed approaching that point, and, lo! the weather turned back again in his favor. After holding the land by fitful bursts of bitter cold, after his wishing day after day for the spring to come, lo! the skies turned violent and rainy as they had been in his first memories: full circle, and tomorrow he would truly be able to say, offhandedly, oh, it was thus last year, like any ordinary Man.

“ ‘Twill wash the snow away before morning,” he said.

“If it don’t turn all to ice again,” Uwen said, “as it did. If old North Wind wins the contest one more time an’ comes back in force, there’ll be slippin’ and slidin’ from here to the river.”

Let the rain for good and all erase the snow, Tristen wished, passing his hand across the colored glass panes, and this time feeling power leap to his will.

Let the spring come, he said to himself. Winter had had its day and more. It was time for that season of rain and leaves whispering and roaring in the storm.

It was time for the tracery of water on windows and the crack of thunder in the night.

It was time again for the sheer beauty of a green leaf stuck to gray stone, and the terror of Mauryl’s staff, like thunder, crack! against the pavings.

He had forgotten his clothes that day, and Mauryl had chided him, patiently, always patiently and with a faint sense of grief and disappointment that had stung so keenly then. It still did.

He had remembered a robe tonight—but his heart yearned toward the outside and the rain and the memory of chill water on his skin, and Mauryl’s cloak after, and the fire at Ynefel. If he failed there, Mauryl would forgive him, wrap him in warmth, make all things right.

If he failed here, in his war for Cefwyn’s lady, there was no mercy.

He would have come full circle tomorrow evening, but Mauryl would not come back. Had not Uwen told him—that men did not do over the things they had done, but that the seasons did?

So there was both change and sameness, there was progress and endless circles. The Great Year and the Year of Years themselves produced the same result: Men changed; Men died; babes were born, and grew; and died; the seasons varied little.

Thunder rattled the leaded windows, fit to shake the stones.

Owl called.

And elsewhere and to the west a wizardling babe waked, and moved in startlement, heart leaping.

Then pain began, an alarming pain, a sense of sliding inevitability—and change that could not be called back.

Tristen rested his hands on the marble beneath the window, dreaded the thunder he felt imminent, and winced to its rapid crack, feeling it through all his bones at once.

“M’lord?” Uwen said, seizing his arm.

He had felt pain before. This was different. This, this was the pain of a babe attempting to be born in haste, by wizardry.

This was the fear of a woman distraught and alarmed, a woman who well knew the risks.

He heard a voice urging, Let it be now, let it be now.

Now was not the time Orien would choose. But the voice continued relentlessly, striving to coax the babe into the world, urging the mother to join her efforts.

—Master Emuin, he called out into the gray space.

Emuin was there, aware and alarmed.

—She’s trying to force it, Emuin said. She must not. It must not, young lord.

—It’s too early.

—In every way. It wants not to come at all. She begins now to ensure the day of the calendar at least. No,—damn! Midnight! She strives for midnight! And she must not succeed. Make it quiet! Hush! Be still!

He had no idea how to calm the babe and the mother, while the thunder cracked and the winds of chance and wizardry roared.

In the gray space Orien’s voice urged haste, urged the babe toward birth, and the pain began, stealing his breath.

“Tassand!”

Uwen called for help, thinking him ill, but he drew in a great breath and willed Tarien still, asleep, if nothing else, and the babe to be well.

He was aware of Orien shaking Tarien’s shoulder, encouraging her.

Then she perceived him, and the anger that swept through the gray place was potent as the storm above the roof. Defiance met him. And pain, Tarien’s pain… that came.

He felt the cold marble table surface under his hand, realizing he had shaken Uwen off, and that Uwen was behind him, concerned and not knowing what to do.

—Be still, he willed the babe, and drew in a breath and straightened back, willed against all Orien’s determination that Tarien’s pains cease. Her breaths and his came as one, and be slowed them, slowed all that was happening.

But in his hearing Orien was urging her sister now, that Tarien, having the pangs that heralded the birth, must set to it, must deliver the child or lose it, adding panic and fear for the child to Tarien’s gray presence.

—No, he willed. Neither will happen.

The gray stilled for a heartbeat, a breath, and another, labored, heartbeat.

“What’s happened?” he heard Tassand ask, but he saw Tarien’s surroundings, and in one place he stood, and in another sat, aching and out of breath.

“I don’t know,” Uwen said, “ ‘cept it’s a takin’ of some sort, an’ he ain’t in his own mind. Set ‘im down. Here, m’lord. Here’s a chair.”

He trusted, and sat. Having both bodies doing the same thing made it easier to manage. He gathered his awareness, stretched out fine and far, and found Orien’s angry presence in the gray space, elusive, clever, governing her sister in ways mysterious to him.

He had no need to send to Emuin. Emuin had sent for the midwife, both in the gray space and on Paisi’s quick feet—for thinking the babe a week away, Gran Sedlyn had gone home tonight, as she did one day in seven. Paisi ran, to bring her up the hill, in the storm and the lightning. He was aware of Paisi racing out the West Gate barefoot as he had lived much of his life, slipping on the cobbles, running in icemelt, rapidly insensible of pain.

And at Emuin’s lancing inquiry, he knew Gran Sedlyn’s unfamiliar touch, an old woman roused out of a warm bed and searching, he thought, for stockings, even before Paisi was past the first uptown street.

“There we are, m’lord,” Uwen said, and pressed a warm cup into his hand. He trusted anything from Uwen, and sipped at it, brought to a realization of soldiers and resources at his command.

“The Aswydds,” he said. “Orien’s trying to bring the baby. Go tell the abbot.” The man’s workings were small, but the man knew the Aswydds, too, and the abbot was closer and fleeter of foot than Gran Sedlyn.

He said so, and in the gray space Orien tried to bar him from doing that. So did Tarien, following her sister’s lead blindly, desperately, in her pain. For a moment a storm raged, but harm was all too easy if it came to a struggle, and he disarmed himself and kept out of the gray space except the most minuscule awareness, wishing no harm at all to the baby. Orien might assail him and cause him pain, but he sat and sipped hot tea and bore with it, for rage as she would Orien made no gains against his determination to hold things as they were.

It was Tarien that afflicted him worst, Tarien with her pain, and her fear, and her anger: she tore at him and pleaded for everything to be done.

—Mine! she cried. My son! My baby! Let him alone! Let me alone! You’re killing my baby!

—Your sister will harm him, Tristen answered her. It’s your sister’s time, not his. Hear him. Hear him, not Orien!

But Tarien was blind in her fear and deaf. Orien was her life, and Orien said now was the time. Orien said to wait was to kill her child—and so he wished them all quiet, smothered Orien’s dire warnings under stifling silence, smothered Tarien’s fears and even the babe’s silent struggle.

A distressed guard came to his door to report screams from the Aswydds within the apartment, and that the baby might be coming. And at the same moment Uwen had returned, reporting the abbot was awake.

“As he’s prayin’, or whatever he can do. Ye want me to go over there?” Uwen asked, meaning the other wing. “A midwife I ain’t, but babes an’ foals is some alike.”

“It won’t be tonight,” Tristen said into what seemed a great hush. “Orien wishes it. But I wish otherwise.”

“M’lord,” Uwen said with some evident misgiving. “A baby once’t it starts comin’ ain’t amenable to arguments. Ye stop it, an’ ye might kill the baby.”

“The babe’s alive,” he said, staring into that gray distance, “and so is Tarien.”

“It ain’t good,” Uwen said. “It ain’t a good thing, m’lord, if there’s a choice.”

“There isn’t,” he said, and drew a deep breath, aware of Orien and Tarien and the babe all at once.

“What are they at?” Uwen asked him. “Is it the baby comin’?”

“Orien wishes it,” he said, and went back to his chair in the study, picked up a just-poured cup of tea as thunder cracked and boomed above the roof, wizardous and uncertain. The gray space opened wide to him, and Orien was there, and Tarien appeared, a hurt, small presence with the child wrapped close, not yet free. “But the time is wrong.”

“The babe’s?” Uwen asked, “Or master Emuin’s?”

“Both,” Tristen said, with utter assurance, sipped his tea, and Uwen’s expression eased.

He knew others had waked, now. Emuin was there, and from a greater distance, Crissand roused out of a sound sleep, confused and alarmed and half-awake. Cevulirn had sat up, in his bed in the camp outside the walls.

They consented to what he wished so strongly—supported him, as if they had set arms about him, not questioning what his wish was. Their trust in him was a heady drink, and gave him strength against Orien.

And not just Orien. He became aware of a presence elsewhere, from far away, from the north, from Tasmôrden’s direction, and that presence was thin and subtle and laced with excitement and desire.

He would not have that. He flung himself from the chair with a crash of the teacup, sent a table over as he flung out a hand to the nearest wall and willed the wards to life, strong, stronger than any intrusion.

The wards sprang up blue and strong as he could make them, from here to the town gates: he felt them, and as he turned about, hearing outcries and questions, he saw astonished faces, Tassand’s, and one of the guards from upstairs. But Uwen was there, too, calm and steady, saying to the rest, “ ‘At’s all right, His Grace is seein’ to what’s amiss, just ye stan’ still and don’t fret.”

In that moment violence lanced between the fortress and the heavens, and Emuin’s will deflected it. Thunder boomed and shook the very stones, and men cried aloud in fright.

“We’re inside,” Uwen said, “an’ Ts Grace is watchin’ out for us, so the lightnin’s ain’t to fear. An’ if he don’t want that babe born tonight, ‘e won’t be.”

Crack! went the thunder above them, and Emuin flung out an angry wish to the heavens, chiding the storm… and Orien Aswydd.

So Tristen did, and stood fast while three more sharp cracks pealed and boomed through the stones. The very air seemed charged, and the smell of thunderstorms and wet stone permeated the apartment, as if a window were open.

A woman’s voice cried out in agony, and that pain went through the gray space.

—Bring him into the world! Orien cried, defying him as the lightning whited the windows. Do nothing they wish!

Lightning flared beyond the window, such as he had never seen, whitening everything in the room, and blinding him, deafening him with the crack of thunder.

The blindness lingered a moment in the gray space, and in the world of Men. His sight cleared slowly on Uwen and the frightened staff, sight shot through with drifting fire. And the wards were under assault, from within and from without.

“I’ll go to her,” he said, and forgot, as once on the parapets of Ynefel, that he had left his clothing. It was his servants and Uwen who pressed that necessity on him, and dressed him in haste, a few moments’ delay while he shivered in the cold, as his sight within the world and within the gray space slowly returned, and all the while the wards rang and echoed to the assault. Emuin held it. He did. He was aware of Cevulirn and Crissand, both dim and far and confused about the source, both in danger.

—Silence! he bade them harshly. Be still! Hold the wards!

In that, their efforts aided him. The ringing grew more distant. Tarien grew quiet, but he was aware of Orien prowling the wards of a physical room, her room, Cefwyn’s room, the room where the babe had begun its life. She attempted the window, and opened it, bringing in a gust of rain-laden air. It did not breach their protection: he would not permit it, and, dressed at least to his servants’ insistence, he left his apartment, went down the hall and down the stairs, then up again, to the wing that housed the women, while Orien raged at the barriers of the sisters’ prison.

Owl whisked up the stairs, a fleeting Shadow of an Owl, as he came to the floor where the women were. Guards were at sharp attention as he passed them, going toward the doors.

Earl Prushan was waked from his sleep, the Aswydds’ neighbor in that hall: the old man had come out in his night robe, with his bodyguard and his servants, and farther down the hall, so had Earl Marmaschen and some of the lesser residents, like shopkeepers gap-ing at some parade in the streets, for he brought himself, and Uwen, and his guard.

“Open the door,” he said to the guards who watched the doors.

Orien had opened every window, to judge by the cold wet blast that met him in the foyer and the windblown flare of drapery as he Went into the room. The candles within had all but a few gone out, and in that semidarkness sat Tarien in a chair by the billowing draperies, with Orien leaning over her, arms about her heaving shoulders.

“Let her be!” Tristen ordered Orien.

“She is my sister!” Orien cried in indignation. “My sister! The babe is coming! Let her be! This is women’s work!”

Tristen strode to the open window vent and shut it, stopping at least that source of draft and harm, and the ringing of the wards grew dim. The thunder still muttered above them, and lightning flashes made the roofs a tangled maze outside the clear and stained panes of the leaded glass.

Then he turned to the women, and willed the child quiet.

Orien willed otherwise, and held to her sister, cornered as they were. They were down to two candles, and those fluttering, the wards he set threatened, if not overwhelmed, until Uwen shut that vent as well.

His guards stood in the doorway. And Orien hated them, op^ posed them with all her might, as Tarien’s face showed pale in the candlelight, and Tarien’s hands made fists that battered the chair arms.

“Let me be!” she cried in the grip of renewed pain. “Let him come! Oh, gods!”

She convulsed, but the babe resisted: his time was not yet, and he wanted help not to leave the shelter he had, not to move to Orien Aswydd’s bidding. And Tarien breathed in great, rapid gasps, her hands clenched on the chair now like claws, and the breath stopped, as if she could not get another.

“Out!” Orien screamed at them, and at him: “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her!”

“Be easy,” he said, and touched Tarien’s hand nonetheless. A breath came. “Be still.”

“Don’t hear him!” Orien said. “Bring the child into the world!”

They were linked, these twins: Tarien’s body clenched in pain, answering her sister.

“No,” he said. He feared for the guards, and Uwen; and he turned on Orien himself, gathering force, wishing not to harm the one twin, but resolved now to sever them.

—No! Orien cried, and flung all she had at him.

But he saw how in the gray space a delicate knot bound them, delicate but strong and of lifelong standing. It was not force that would sever it, or the keenest knife, only a delicate undoing, and both twins resisted, Tarien with sobs and interrupted breath, half-fainting in her sister’s arms.

He would not that Orien force her sister. He would not, and Orien fought back with burning eyes and a grip in this world and the gray that defied him to untangle her.

He began to do so, in the gray space, prying the two apart, but it was agony for Tarien, who clung to her sister, and would not let her go.

Then he knew Emuin was aware, and was on his arthritic way up the stairs toward him, already in this wing. Paisi, too, was hastening Gran Sedlyn out her door. Thunder cracked, the heavens riven and battering the windows with rain.

—Let him come! Orien cried. This is the mixing of bloods, this is the heir of the High Kings, this is the vessel of the great lord, and in him is the prophecy, greater than Mauryl’s working, longer than Mauryl’s working!

—Hasufin Heltain’s vessel, Emuin said, at distance, overcome with a pain in his side. Orien struck at him, intending a mortal wound, struck at Uwen, who could not perceive it, struck at him, at every living thing in her reach, randomly and without reason.

“No!” Tarien screamed, as a crack of thunder ripped the air. Her back arched away from the chair and Tristen flung himself to his knees, seized Tarien’s clawed hand in his, and willed her pain to ebb.

Threat lanced at his back; and Uwen was there, quick as Orien’s strike.

A silver knife struck the floor and spun away across the figured carpet, ending under a chest. Orien struggled in Uwen’s grip, but Tristen willed her silent and her curses void. Her strength was ebbing, like the thunder that muttered in the distance now, after that last violence. He held Tarien’s clammy fingers in his, tenderly, quietly.

“Be still,” he said, sorry for her pain. “Hush. Hush.”

“My prince,” Tarien said between pangs and on sobbing breaths. “He was my prince, before he was hers—and I have his son. I have his son! She can’t take that away!”

“Hush,” Tristen said, and rode the waves of pain with her: he could do that, now, in the quiet that settled around them. He smoothed the waves, stilled them to a flat sameness of discomfort, until she leaned her head against the chair and drew deep breaths, sweat beading her white brow.

The child within grew quiet.

“Your sister wants your child,” Emuin said harshly, and he was there in the room, a shadow against the last two candles. “She wants him for Hasufin Heltain, and to be his, the babe must die—open your eyes, woman! You have a little of the craft and a smattering of the wisdom! You’d have more if you didn’t blind yourself! See her! Look at what she truly wishes!”

“Let my sister alone!” Orien cried from across the room, where Uwen and the guards had taken her. “Let me go! Damn you!”

She was exhausted now, not an imminent threat. “Shut that window!” Emuin said, and Gweyl moved, shut the last of the window vents, at the far end of the row. That stopped the bitter draft. “Fool!” Emuin said, and meant Orien Aswydd.

“Murderer!” Orien screamed back, and wished Emuin dead, as she had wished him dead at summer’s end, and moved one of her servants to murder him. “I curse you!” she cried, and tried things she had read in ancient parchments, a treasure trove of Mauryl’s letters, but Emuin swept that aside with hardly more effort.

“It’s not the words,” Emuin said, “it’s the wisdom, and that doesn’t come by wishing, woman! It doesn’t come by spite! Come, gather it up! Can you?”

She could not. All her efforts scattered to the winds. The storm was gone, the violence within it was gone, and what was within Orien ebbed and dissipated like the force of the wind. The air had that feeling.

“Take her to the guardhouse,” Emuin said, “and stand guard over her. You, Gweyl, yourself.”

“No!” Orien cried, outraged. “Tarien!”

Tristen made no move to intervene. Emuin had the matter in hand, and the wrongness within Tarien’s body was the greatest concern, the distress of the child. He dimly heard the commotion of Orien’s forcible departure, but he held Tarien’s hand and willed her safe and the baby safe until he lost all feeling in his knees—and until finally a more friendly fuss in the room heralded Gran Sedlyn’s arrival, a peasant woman with strong, competent hands and a comforting voice.

“Get the lady to bed,” was Gran Sedlyn’s quick order, and Tristen gathered himself up as Uwen helped Tarien to rise, and between the two of them, one on a side, they took Lady Tarien to her bed in the next room—the same that had been Cefwyn’s bed when he was here.

There Gran settled her and tucked pillows beneath her back and made her comfortable. “No place here for men,” Uwen said, and drew him back.

But Tarien’s hands moved upon those sheets, and he sensed, in that haze to which her mind had retreated as the pain had eased, the memory in her of that bed, her bed, a hint of remembered scent, that was Cefwyn.

There was love, a woman’s love, at once foreign to him and comprehensible: love and loss of a man, and a bond to the child within.

No place here for men, Uwen had said, and he felt strange and lost in Tarien’s grief, yet understanding the loss, which was his own loss. Neither of them had kept Cefwyn here. No one could. His Place was elsewhere, his love elsewhere bestowed…

“Summat warm to drink,” Gran Sedlyn wished, whether for herself or for her charge was unsure. Paisi hovered over his gran, and Cook was there, summoned by the abbot, so she said, but little needed now as a midwife: Cook had made sweet tea, and brought it, but Tarien turned her face away angrily and swore she could take no such thing, even as that real scent chased the beloved, remembered scent away. Her spell was broken. She suffered loss again. Women bedeviled her, her sister, Gran, Cook: they hovered and chided and would not let her lie alone in her grief.

It was women’s magic. He felt the soothing influence in the gray space; but elsewhere, at the limits of his awareness, Orien Aswydd raged in her new confinement, full of violence, trying desperately to have Tarien’s attention, and attacking her guards.

He feared for Uwen—acutely, in that instant. He cast Emuin only a glance.

“Orien’s threatened Uwen.”

“Go,” Emuin said, and he left matters in the apartment to Emuin’s care and went out, almost without a guard, for the ones at the door had no orders regarding him and the ones guarding him had all gone downstairs with Uwen.

The wards lower down rang to Orien’s efforts. They had shut her behind an iron door and it did nothing to prevent her curses. He ran to the end of the hall, sped down the west stairs and down and down to the guardroom steps, where Uwen was.

Safe, he was glad to see, but not for any of Orien’s wishing.

“There’s an unhappy woman,” Uwen said with a jerk of his thumb toward the closed door.

“She’s done all she can to breach the wards,” Tristen said, and went down himself, and laid a firm binding on the door and all about.

Within, Orien flung herself at the door and hammered at it with her fists, cursed him and raged at the barrier until her voice cracked.

But she would not get out and no Shadow would get in. Tristen turned and looked at the corners of the small nook where the guardhouse stairs came down, at the dark places beyond the smoking tallow candles.

Reeking of death and slaughter, Emuin had said in rejecting such candles, and reek they did. This entire stairwell did. The Aswydds had made this a place of pain, and so it was now: Shadows lurked in the seams of the stone and in the nooks beyond the light—murdered Elwynim, some; malefactors, murderers, thieves, and traitors… the innocent and the guilty and the unfortunate: all the pain suffered in this place, all the lives that had ended in this small room.

—Be free, he said to some, and others he bound, for it Unfolded to him how to do that, as he had not known when he was confined here himself. She might have rallied such Shadows. He removed them from her reach.

Then the place was quieter, save only Orien Aswydd’s hoarse shrieks and occasional and faltering strikes at the door.

Last of all he felt a presence, a Shadow among other Shadows, and from the tail of his eye thought he saw one he knew—Heryn Aswydd, bloodied and burned as he had died. Cefwyn had sent away all the Aswydd dead and tried to dispossess them of their Place in the world, but the living Aswydds had come here, and brought the dead ones back, or waked this one from sleep, so he feared.

Heryn he bound to the hallway of this little nook, finding no pity for the man who had sought Cefwyn’s life and betrayed so many. A shriek followed; and that was Orien; and silence came after that.

He gazed at Uwen’s shocked face, at the guards who had defied sorcery carrying out his orders—scared men, troubled men. He reached out a hand and touched Uwen’s arm, and then touched one after the other of the rest of them, wishing them well.

A muffled thump attested Orien’s rage at his small magic. Rather than desist he made it a greater one, wishing good to all the soldiers, good to all the house. It was a war of curses and well-wishes, and so it went on for a moment until with a final hammering at the door, Orien desisted.

“Come upstairs,” he said then quietly.

“There ain’t much comfort in that cell,” Uwen said. “ ‘Cept we left a light an’ a pail of water. Shall we fetch a blanket an’ a bench?”

The gate-guards had left the same for him once: a candle in an iron cage, that cast great squares of light about ceiling and walls, and straw to ease the cold of the stones. It seemed too cruel, even for Orien; but she had sped wishes for the baby… she owned it, in her thinking, and it was too hazardous to open that door and engage with her until the dawn. A banished spirit had found its way into the royal house of Althalen: Hasufin Heltain had made his bid for life in a stillborn babe. He had no wish to see it happen here, to Cefwyn’s child.

“Not until dawn,” he said. By then it would be his day, and his evening, and the sun would shine and the darker forces would find less strength. Shadows—and Hasufin was such a Shadow—found the dark far friendlier.

He did not know how long it might be, the watch they had to keep, but Orien had not given up the struggle for the babe’s life, Hasufin’s threat was not yet abated.

And by his will, they would not open that cell door until both things were so.

CHAPTER 3

Tarien slept fitfully, into the middle of a night that saw the snow washed off the roofs and torrents pouring from the gutters. She lay abed, curls of russet hair clinging to a damp brow, in the light of many candles.

The clepsydra’s arm rose to the uppermost, and at that precise instrument’s movement, Emuin poured in a carefully measured cup of water, ready for the purpose, instrument and cup alike on the water-circled dining table of the Aswydds’ apartment.

“Glass,” Emuin said sharply, and Paisi inverted the hourglass that backed their measurements. “Pour the cup.”

“Mark on the paper, master, afore ye forget.”

“I won’t forget! Pour the damned cup! Time’s passing!”

Tristen watched askance, wondering would master Emuin indeed remember to make the mark, which accounted of the finer measures of the night, and watching until he did. The drip of water from the water clock was far more accurate a measure than marked candles and more reliable even than the costly glass… but only if one poured the water back in quickly. Master Emuin had brought it down from his tower, and set it up on the table, and still fussed over what exact moment it had begun.

A spate of rain hit the windows, and lightning flashed.

Cook and the midwife Gran Sedlyn sat watch; and the nuns, who had served the Aswydds before, ran errands for herbals from Gran Sedlyn’s small shop in the lower town. Guards watched. Uwen waited.

So, too, did Orien wait and watch and pace her cell, exhausting herself against unyielding walls and an iron door… most of all hurling her anger against the wards that defended the door. So the guards reported, men unnerved by the strength and persistence of the rages and the virulence of the curses. To the guards stationed there, Paisi had brought blessed charms, from master Emuin, and more from the abbot.

“For what good they’ll do,” Emuin said, “but luck attend them while they stand by that cursed door.—Where’s the damned owl?”

“I don’t know,” Tristen said.

“The bird could make himself of some use,” Emuin said peevishly. But of Owl, for the last hour and more, there was no sign.

Now they watched by candlelight, a cluster of men banished from the vicinity of the bedchamber as too noisy and too much disturbance to Lady Tarien’s pain, but neither Tristen nor Emuin wished to leave Cook and Gran Sedlyn to watch alone, considering the lady’s abilities and ties to her sister. Tarien seemed intent on the child’s good health, seemed not to share her sister’s insistence on a birth tonight, but had seemed rather to be struggling to keep the babe’s own time… until she slept, which they all took for a hopeful sign.

But even the iron latch and the iron door below were not utterly trustworthy barriers against her sister, particularly as ordinary men watched it. There were wishes and wards and barriers… but that link had had years to work, and it was strong. Orien’s will stretched toward her sister, and urged the babe to restlessness.

Yet the hours slipped away, measured by arcane instruments and the patience of Orien’s warders. At the very mid of the night Emuin reasoned she would cease to trouble Tarien, for that marked the start of another day, as some reckoned.

But they were not out of the darkness, nor out of Orien’s hopes. The efforts kept up, as the arm rose and Paisi turned the glass for midnight.

More moments passed.

“Before dawn would seem to be close enough,” Emuin said glumly, “she hasn’t given up.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t know it’s midnight.”

“One congratulates a man on his birth. We are now, by the stars, at yours.”

He had wondered would his life continue past the anniversary of his Summoning. And indeed it had, now, and he sat, substantial, beside another fireside, knowing so much more, and in circumstances he could never have imagined a year ago.

Orien continued her assault.

“Bid the lady in the guardroom know it’s midnight,” Emuin said sharply, and Paisi sped down to the soldiers.

Paisi was gone a time. There was no point at which the efforts ceased—but there was one at which they grew more fierce, furiously, wildly angry.

“Unreasonable woman,” Emuin said. “Disagreeable, unreasonable woman.”

Paisi returned at a run, out of breath, wide-eyed with fright and concerned with what seemed at his very heels. But he had been safe, as the guards were safe, below: Tristen had not been unaware the while of anything that went on in the fortress, and he directed Paisi to a warm spot by the fire until the boy could warm the chill from his bones.

So they sat, their small group of men: Uwen, who knew something of births, and master Emuin, who knew little, and the guards, who had heard much and knew only slightly more, Tristen thought, than he did. Paisi, the youngest, seemed to know most of all of them.

Once more the cup spilled and the glass turned. Twice.

But the third time the sand began to run, something happened in the gray place, and it was no longer stable as it had been. Tarien woke, and the babe woke with her, and a moment later a muted scream came from inside the bedroom.

They all glanced that way, as alarm filled the unseen space, then vanished in Orien’s sudden leap of satisfaction, her assault on the wards. But the assault failed and she fell back again.

“Two hours till dawn,” Emuin said with a heavy breath. “Two hours.”

Another hour approached. Paisi hurried back to the bedroom, not the first such errand, and was gone a space, and came back tight-lipped.

“Gran says as the babby’s comin’ now an’ ‘e ain’t waitin’.”

Tristen drew in a breath and paid attention such as he could spare. The gray place had become slate gray cloud, shot through with red like fire—Orien’s doing, her wishing grown greater with her fear of failure and loss.

Emuin reversed the glass the third time.

And now the gray space began to show a more and less of pain, as it had been at the beginning. When the pain was more, conversation would become difficult and distracted. Tristen left the table and wandered the border by the windows, with an occasional glance to Emuin’s glass and the water clock.

A cry rent the peace, and he could bear no more of it: he left their vigil for that in the bedchamber, where Tarien lay propped on pillows—not the beautiful creature now, but an unhappy and desperate one, caught between their will and her sister’s, back and forth, back and forth, until now she looked at him in the gray space, with eyes dark as the cloud that boiled about them. She began to drift away—pulled, not her own doing—and reached out her hand as if she were sinking, drowning and taking another presence with her.

He seized the outstretched hand, and held it, and wished the pain away, and the life within her safe, while the winds howled and the life in her ebbed. She had strayed right to the Edge, and that darkness half-swallowed her, at times less, at times more. He held on.

—Come this way, he begged her. Come with me.

—My sister, she said repeatedly, my sister.

For another voice called her, and another self was there, within the darkness… at least one more was there, and perhaps others. It seemed to Tristen he heard Heryn’s voice, full of anger and demands, and he felt Tarien cower. Her hold on his hand slipped and slipped again.

And then the Wind came, sweeping the others away, and whispered, most gently, mostly kindly:

—Let me be born. Woman, let me be.

And the cramping pains struck, fierce and strong, carried on Orien’s wish, driven by the Wind.

—Here, my lord, he is yours… Or ten’s voice rang strong and clear. Orien’s will drove Tarien’s body, and Orien’s presence, stronger than ever she had been in the gray place, swallowed Tarien’s will like the Edge itself.

“No!” Tarien cried out as she slipped, and in the World, her nails bit deeply into Tristen’s hand. He knelt by her bed and wished the pain away, seeking her presence in the gray world, feeling her sever that connection to Orien strand by strand as it pulled her toward the edge.

Rejecting her sister, preserving the life within her… she slipped and he felt her nails pierce his hand.

“It’s coming!” the midwife said. “It’s comin’, ain’t no question now, m’lady. It must come.”

Emuin leaned into the doorway. “A handful of sand, a handful of sand, woman—wait that long! It’s too early!”

—My lord, here’s your vessel!

Tarien screamed, vehement as Orien at her worst, beside herself with pain and lashing out at her sister. —You’ll not have him!

Orien vanished. Still the child came.

“Wizardry, woman!” Emuin shouted, and wished with a force that might stop a river in its course. “You wanted wizardry! Use it now! Orien wants your son. Your sister wants him for a vessel for her master! Is that your wish? Is it? Save his life, woman, bold back!”

“It’s comin’, it’s coming,” Gran Sedlyn said.

“I can’t!” Tarien screamed, and the baby’s drive for the world of Men would not be denied again.

The Edge was all the gray space now, and Tristen held fast, unwilling to relinquish his grip. On Tarien his hold was firm… but the presence within her flowed out, whirled away into the dark, and flew out of reach.

“Stillbirth,” the midwife said.

“Damn!” he heard Emuin say.

And again in the gray space, and with telling force: Damn!

—Hold to her, Tristen said. Master Emuin, help me hold her. She’ll die.

—It’s the baby he wants, Emuin said to him. His hair and beard and garments alike streamed in the gale that the Edge swallowed up. Tarien was half in it, the babe all the way gone…

But something was in the dark: the Wind that gathered itself for a first breath in the World.

—Not yours, Tristen said to the Wind, with all the force that was in him, and of a sudden he felt the rush of Owl’s wings past his hair. Owl soared ahead of him into that gulf and he found himself rushing into it, a familiar place after all, a place of blue light, beating with wings.

A boy stood there, preoccupied among the hawks, a well-dressed, fair-haired boy who began to look toward him, head turning, until the Wind called him by a name Tristen, hearing, could not hear— would not hear, for it was not the name he knew for the child.

—Elfwyn, Tristen said, commanding attention, and now the boy cast him a dark-eyed glance. With the very next blink the boy was a well-grown youth, straight and tall, with Cefwyn’s very look.

—Sir? said the boy, but the dark within the dark was in his eyes.

Tristen reached out his hand, wishing the boy to come to him, wishing him safe and his mother and his father safe.

Fire leapt up, spectral red amid the cool blue light as the Wind called to the boy again. Out of that fire a black figure advanced, outlined in Wind-driven flame, and the boy faltered as that Shape held out a commanding, open hand. The wind roared, and the boy stood transfixed, fair hair torn by that Wind, hand all but touching the hand that reached for his.

—Elfwyn! The second time Tristen called, commanding now, and

the boy’s bead turned, the hand dropped. The name that was not the boy’s Name echoed again in the nameless light and the dark hand seized on the youth’s shoulder.

And in the very teeth of the gale Tristen called a third time, the magical time: Elfwyn!

The boy looked at him in startlement and the dark eyes turned cornflower blue, pale and with a hint of gray, until there was nothing of the darkness in them. The boy’s hand touched his.

The Wind raged and tore at them. Needles of ice and pain lanced through flesh and bone, and the gulf gaped under them.

Then Owl flashed between, bound away, and with that guidance Tristen turned toward what he knew was home, with the boy in his grasp. They traveled toward the darkness beyond the rows of birds on their perches, and constantly Owl flew ahead of him. Tristen gripped the boy’s shoulder, then his hand, and increasingly as he walked the hand he held was smaller and smaller, and the steps faltered, until he must sweep the child up within his arms, and hold him fast as he walked toward the dark circle.

He saw candlelight. He stepped into it…

And drew a great, deep breath, flavored with the cold of the downstairs hall at the site of the haunt, that stretch of odd flooring that fronted the old mews. He found himself with a newborn baby in his arms, a wizened, bloody creature with tight-clenched eyes and clenched fists, a babe that suddenly drew breath and let it out in a loud and lusty wail.

He slipped the pin of his cloak, the blood red of Amefel, and wrapped the baby in it against the chill… he walked, and guards posted at the stairs stared with misgivings as he passed with the small bundle in his arms.

He climbed the west steps, and passed guards he had not passed going out of Tarien’s apartment, men struck with consternation and surely wondering where he had been.

He did not venture the gray space now. He had no idea where that shortcut might send him and the babe both. He had no idea where Owl had gone, but when he reached Tarien’s apartment the guards opened the door for him. He carried his small angry charge through the outer chambers into the one where Tarien lay, and Emuin watched, and Gran Sedlyn met him with a face astonished and distraught.

“You took it!” Gran Sedlyn said, and behind her, Paisi stared, round-eyed.

He said not a word, but took the baby to Emuin, who sat by Tarien’s bedside, holding her hand, and she all disheveled and with her red hair pasted about her temples.

“We took out the sheets,” Gran Sedlyn was saying, a noise in his ears, “an’t was as if maybe we took out the babby amongst ‘em by mistake. We couldn’t find ‘im, we couldn’t find ‘im, and Your Grace had ‘im all the time… and where was Your Grace?” the confused woman asked. “Sittin’ here, as I thought, and then…”

“He’s safe,” Tristen said.

“Safe,” Emuin echoed him, with meaning, and maintained a fierce ward over the place, over the woman who rested, pale and shrunken, amid the pillows. Only as Tristen unwrapped his small burden and showed her the baby’s face did her eyes open wide, and go from grief to wonder. Her hands reached, not as Orien’s had reached, but with an urgent, tender desire. He laid the baby on her breast, and Tarien folded her arms around her child, and looked at him as if the very sight poured strength and life into her.

“His name is Elfwyn,” Tristen said, and Tarien’s eyes flashed wide, lips parted, perhaps to protest she wanted some other name. But she said not a word. Emuin looked at him, too, and with a sharper, worried expression, but without dispute.

“Elfwyn,” Emuin said.

“My baby prince,” Tarien murmured, with her lips against the infant’s pale and matted hair.

“Let’s wash ‘im,” Gran Sedlyn said. “Let’s ‘ave a look ‘ere, m’lady.”

“No,” Tarien said. “No one will take my baby. No one will take him!”

“Hear me, woman,” Emuin said harshly, and with a hand on the child and Tarien’s arm. “He has his right soul in him. This is truly Cefwyn’s child. That isn’t what your sister wanted. Do you understand?”

“She’s dead,” Tarien said. Her lips faltered as if they were frozen. “She’s dead. She can’t have him. My prince loved me, and she’ll never have him!”

Emuin looked at Tristen, and Tristen at him, with the feeling in his heart that Tarien was not mistaken. He left the room, unwashed and exhausted, and suddenly aware that Uwen was not there, and Uwen would never have left his heels. Gweyl and all his new guards were gone somewhere, but Lusin and Tawwys had come in, among the silent wardens of the Zeide, and Syllan and Aran were outside as if they had never left their former duty to him.

“There was fire,” Lusin said, and had no sooner said, than Uwen came through the door, soot smeared about him, and with Gweyl close behind.

“Thank the gods,” Uwen said. “They said ye’d come downstairs, an’ the fire, an’ all—”

“Orien burned,” Tristen surmised.

“In her cell,” Uwen said, and held his hands as if he wanted a place to wipe them, in this prince’s apartment. “Set the pallet alight, the candle to the straw, an’ the chokin’ smoke afore the flame: it were like an oven in that cell, an’ the guards up above didn’t know’t till the smoke come up the stairs.”

That flaring strength in the gray space… Orien’s attempt to drive Tarien to birth: in death she had reached for freedom and bound herself to the stones of the Zeide.

“Where was ye, m’lord? Where’d ye go?—An’ what’s this wi’ the babe?”

“In there,” Tristen said, still unsure he should have given the child to Tarien, but compelled to it by a magic that spoke to him as strongly as the wind and the earth themselves. “With Lady Tarien.”

“Gods bless,” Uwen said, and raked his hair back with a sooted hand, leaving streaks on his brow. “Gods bless. An’ ‘Er Grace dead an ‘er ladyship wi’ the baby. An’ what’s to be wi’ him?”

“He’s Cefwyn’s,” Tristen said. “And Emuin’s there. Emuin won’t leave him.” He felt that as surely as he had felt the strength and the will in Tarien’s arms. “He’s Cefwyn’s son, his name is Elfwyn, and Hasufin won’t have him.”

There was a new Shadow loose within the wards downstairs. He was sure of that. It was bound to the stones of the place, exactly as he had once feared would happen when he had advised Cefwyn to exile all the Aswydds and not to execute them. An iron door had not been enough to hold Orien Aswydd prisoner: she had proved that well enough.

But in the purpose she held worth her life, she had failed. She was not done with trying for wizardry, perhaps, and Hasufin himself could not fault her effort or her courage… but she had failed.

He went back to the door to reassure himself all was well within the room, and saw Emuin and Lady Tarien and the babe, all in the light of a single candle.

He saw a life that had not existed before now. He found that, amid all else, the most remarkable thought, and he took with him the remembrance of the boy and the youth who might someday remember meeting him, in the maze of the mews.

Owl joined them as he and Uwen left the apartment, and banked away down the stairs, to the startlement of the guards below, he was sure. Whether Owl was satisfied he had no idea.

But on the precise day on which Emuin calculated Mauryl had Summoned him to life, at the very first light of dawn, an entirely new soul had drawn a first breath, and Cefwyn had a son.

CHAPTER 4

Rain and thunder above canvas brought dreams of campaigns past, recollections of mud and hard living far to the south—of days spent waiting and nights spent in far less luxury than a royal pavilion, two cots made into one, and warmth against one’s side.

But that warmth gathered herself in the last hours of the rain-drenched night and stole away… and over to the baggage piled out of the rain, in a corner of the huge tent. Cefwyn paid slight attention, deciding that Ninévrisë had thought of something undone, or left, or needed, in the way one did in the middle of the night on a journey, with all one’s belongings confined to chests and boxes, and had the servants remembered the new boots or packed the writing kit?

Gods knew. There were times one simply had to get up and dispose of the question, and this night of noise and fury in the heavens, with the tent blown hard by the gusts and no great likelihood the army was going to break camp in the morning—this was such a troubled night, on their slow way through the edge of Murandys and to the river camp.

But Ninévrisë, having rummaged up something, or failed to find something, was quiet for a long while after.

Too long, Cefwyn decided. He had made up his mind to sleep late, having waked several times to realize the deluge continued, and still cherished the notion of late sleep until he rolled over to see what she was doing and saw her standing distressedly in the lightning flashes, with something flat and pale pressed to her bosom.

Then he knew that what she had ferreted from the baggage, from her belongings, was a piece of paper, that paper, and at this hour.

He shoved an elbow under him, looking at her in concern until he had a glance back.

Then she came back to him, and threw herself on her knees by the bedside.

“The baby’s born,” she said. “Tonight, the baby’s born.”

It was certainly not the sort of news to cheer either of them. The letter had told them nothing more till now, until he had ceased to believe it was anything but an inert scrap of unwritten paper.

But now this news broke through the days of silence, at the lightning-shot edge of a dawn that saw the army stalled, the roads surely turned to ponds and rivers.

And now in the dark of the tent he could not judge her expression, whether she wept, or frowned, or had no expression at all.

“More news,” she said, and her voice trembled, barely audible above the battering of rain on the canvas walls. “Orien’s dead.”

“Orien.” He was taken aback, and wondered whether she had mistaken the twins and misspoken. Women died in childbirth, and should it not be Tarien who died at this birth?

“She burned to death,” Ninévrisë said. “She burned in her cell.”

“Good gods.” His memory of a glorious, beautiful woman could not fit the image of such a death. He raked his hair back, pushed upright and hauled the blanket around him against the chill of the rain and the unhappy report. “I take it it’s that letter,” he said. “Is that all he says?”

“The baby’s name is Elfwyn,” she said. “Tarien called him Maur-ydd, after the old wizard, I think; but Tristen said he was Elfwyn, so Elfwyn he is, now.”

A king’s name, for a king’s bastard. And not only a king’s name, but the name of the last High King. That would not go unremarked among his uneasy barons. It was provocative and a trouble to the child and to him. Gods, what was Tristen thinking?

“What more?” he asked, unsettled. Tristen could be feckless at the most damnable times. “What news of Tristen?”

“He…” Ninévris딑s breath caught in her throat. She seemed to have caught a chill despite her robe, small wonder, at such news, and he moved quickly to gather her up and into his arms, in the warmth of an occupied bed.

The shivering kept up for a moment, and now he knew the truth, for Ninévrisë had taken the matter of Tarien’s baby so entirely worldly-wise and matter-of-factly he had convinced himself she accepted it without a ripple.

Now in a stroke he doubted all his assumptions, about this, about all the other slights she took so calmly. She forgave him in the very embrace of her arms and the inclinations of her heart, but the existence of a child named as, gods help them, Tristen of all people… had named this child… what could she think?

What could anyone think?

And what did Tristen think, giving his son that name? Not a damned thing, was the first conclusion that leapt up in him: Tristen could be the most feckless soul alive, did things because those were the thoughts he said Unfolded to him, thoughts that leapt into a head that otherwise could be utterly absorbed with a hawk’s flight or the shape of a leaf.

Yet Tristen, the worst liar in all Ylesuin, was not dealing with a hawk or a leaf in this child… this was not something Tristen would treat casually or on a whim, and the other aspect of his flighty concentration was that absolute, terrifying honesty, in which he would leap in where no courtier would tread. He had met that appalling honesty when—gods! when he had left off his folly of love-making with the Aswydd women and gone downstairs to look a stranger in the eyes… and he had never after been able to avoid that stare, that truth, that honesty. Like a boulder in a brook, it had diverted all his life into a different path.

And now… now the result of that moment was a child, and Tristen named him. He was deaf to wizardry, but like a deaf man, he could feel the drumbeat in the ground under him: a moment had come back to haunt him and change his life.

Elfwyn Tristen named the boy. So, indeed, Elfwyn he was, the will and word of his unacknowledged father and his father’s wife notwithstanding.

And this Elfwyn, this bastard prince, was in fact heir to nothing, since his only legitimate claim, Amefel—where a maternal lineage did have legal force—had passed to Tristen’s hands. But in his Aswydd and Marhanen blood he had substantial claims to everything in reach, if he one day decided to reach for it and cause a world of trouble.

With that name, the name of the last Sihhë High King, he had claims to gods knew what more.

Is this, he asked himself, the King To Come? This child? Mine? It was not what he had thought. Tristen was what he had thought, and trusted Tristen’s complete lack of ambition. But this? Did Tristen name his own heir, in this child?

“It’s not all,” Ninévrisë said faintly, holding to him, “it’s not all. Ryssand’s with Tasmôrden.”

He laughed, untimely, unseemly given the circumstances. “That’s no news.”

“He means to kill you.”

A second time he laughed, this time because he was already set to laugh and wanted to deny all fears tonight and reassure her… but on his next breath he fully heard what she had said, and knew it was part of that letter, and felt cold through and through—not believing, far from disbelieving a warning from Tristen—and in the context of this newborn child, potential heir, potential pretender to more than two thrones.

“Here?” he asked.

“Tristen overheard some sort of plot, I don’t know how, but I think the way wizards know. Tasmôrden’s courting Ryssand—he’s persuading Ryssand, with all sorts of promises if you should die, if we should die… that they’ll make peace, for lands, all the bargain to be good no matter who makes it. Efanor would have no way to rally an army.”

“Does Tristen say that?”

She hesitated. “I think it’s been there a while. It doesn’t feel part of the rest, but I only heard it tonight. I think it was the disturbance there. And I wasn’t sure of it before, but now I know it’s there… I don’t think I thought it was different, thinking you by no means trust Ryssand, or Cuthan, either. But it’s different now, and I know, and I don’t know how I know, except it’s from the letter. But Tristen doesn’t know where we are, he doesn’t know we’ve marched—”

“He’s not received my message.”

“Not yet. It’s not yet there. But what Tristen knows, in the letter… and what I know in my heart… I’m not sure which of us knows it, but between us, I do know, and Ryssand is coming. He’ll pretend to have a change of heart. He’ll count on your welcoming him. And he’ll betray you, and I don’t know how I know!”

“Do you know it for the truth?” he asked. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“I’m afraid,” she said. “And I don’t know why, except this letter.”

A paper blank except for seal and signature, and no more readable for him than before… wizard-work. Magic, Emuin insisted. Perhaps it was even bound to the truth of the situation, reporting when the world grew chancy enough and the barriers that divided them from Tristen and from their enemies grew thin.

Lightning made shadow play on the canvas walls, the outline of other tents close at hand. It felt like dawn, but the clouds were so thick and the rain so intense no light reached them. Idrys, Lord Commander, but still in his intentions his bodyguard, slept, or pretended to sleep, in the other chamber of this tent, among the maps and the armor. Waking guards sat duty there, too, out of the rain, men who had been with him even in Amefel. Close by their tent was the entire Dragon Guard, trusted men.

Could he fear for his life and hers tonight, so protected?

So too, he had claimed the mass of the Guelens and the rest of the common levy, and held a camp on its way to war. Osanan had joined them. Marisal was sending men. He had rallied more men than he had hoped.

Were there traitors already insinuated among these men?

They were bogged in a lightning-shot deluge that had followed sun and then snow. The heavens were utterly confused—and that was surely wizardry or the worst weather-luck a campaign ever had: and here they were bound for the river bridge, and as yet had seen nothing of the contingent from Murandys, when Murandys was the land through which they traveled.

Nelefreissan and Ryssand had farther to march, and it had not been certain they would come, since Ryssand’s storming out of court and out of the capital, but would they now, if Ryssand meant some act against him?

There was no one else he could summon. His missives southward he had sent in a bundle, all to Tristen, to give to the lords with him, for he knew now that letters to their capitals would not find them at home, but rallied at Henas’amef, to come by the southern bridge, for the stony hills of Gerath lay between, a wedge of land that had no straight trails, and all too many blind valleys: it had swallowed armed force before now and given nothing back. Tristen could not reach him.

And was the north to betray him?

Thank the gods at least the southerly bridge, the one Tristen held, would not become the sally port for Tasmôrden to start a diversion in Amefel.

“So Ryssand will come,” he mused aloud, “with nefarious intent. And dare I say his message with Cuthan passed both ways, and he passes all we do to Tasmôrden? Who knows? Tasmôrden might have such a letter as we have.”

“Ryssand intends to kill you,” Ninévrisë insisted, more directly, more urgently. “If he does, Tasmôrden will let the army retreat from the field, and Ryssand, and Murandys, and all of them… all under truce… they will deal with him. They will sign a peace. The army will march home, owning part of Elwynor. They’ll crown Efanor.”

This was no idle threat, but a well-formed plot. He found himself perversely intrigued by the mechanisms of what might be his death. Did men often have such a vision of events to follow their impending demise? It was like a taste of wizard-sight.

“No dagger in the dark,” he surmised. “Nothing so definite. That leaves witnesses and evidence. But men lose heart on a battlefield. Ryssand takes the field, his heavy horse fails the charge—breaks and falls back. The wing they’re in collapses. The enemy sweeps around. Our army makes haste in retreat… and the rest follow. Hard for a man to stand when his neighbor’s flung down his shield and bolted. Never count the good men that will die in such a maneuver.”

“Tell Idrys. Kill Ryssand before he even arrives here!”

Ah, for his gentle bride. “Not that simple.”

“It is that simple. This man will kill you!”

“Out of a dream and a letter with nothing written on it? Gods, all of this is such a flight of ifs!”

“Don’t make light of me!”

“I do hear you. I take it in utmost seriousness.”

“Is Tarien’s baby an if? Is Ryssand, then?”

“No.”

“If we seem about to win, then what will Ryssand do? Someone may tell more than Ryssand dares have known if you take prisoners of Tasmôrden’s side. He daren’t have you win! He’ll only grow more desperate to strike at you, a knife, or poison—witnesses won’t matter then. He’ll want to set Efanor on the throne, see him wed to Artisane, and then Efanor’s gone. Look at all he’s done! He’s severed you from the southern army. He’s dared bring Cuthan to court. He’s affronted you and stormed out. If he comes to join you now, you’ll know what he intends. Be rid of him! Gods, be rid of him!”

Idrys advised it. Now Ninévrisë advised him the same.

And yet—and yet he had no evidence to justify himself to the rest of the barons. He had no proof of Ryssand’s actions, more than that damning letter to Parsynan Tristen had sent him, and that was old proof. A great deal of water had flowed under the bridge since then… most significantly that he had let Efanor court Ryssand’s daughter; now if he ordered Ryssand’s head on a pike, would the rest of the orthodox north still take the field with good will? Would they fight to the uttermost to support a king who had just killed the foremost of them?

One thing was suddenly very clear to him.

“You, love, can’t stay in their reach.”

“Elwynor is no Guelen prize! My land, my crown—”

“My heir,” he said in a low, determined voice, and with his arms about her. “My love. My very dear love, you’re the foremost hostage they could hold… your welfare, above all heirs and all else. I love you. I honor your claim and risk all my kingdom to bring it to you. But this warning, if I believe it, changes everything.”

“I am sovereign in Elwynor! You swore—”

“I deny you nothing. I admit every claim. I make myself your debtor when I ask you—I plead with you, for my own peace of mind—to take our son and our heir out of harm’s way.”

“Back to Efanor, who has enough to do to defend his own interests, let alone mine!”

“Efanor has men enough and guile enough to keep you safe. I know my brother. I know my brother as he was before he took to priests, and I swear to you there’s a man there. If he should take the throne, Ryssand wouldn’t like it.”

“I believe it all, I never doubted it, but I won’t leave you.”

“Nevris.” He pressed her head still with his hand, hugged her tightly against him.

“I’ll not go, thinking I’ll never see you again!”

“I swear to you I’ve no intention of dying, love. I’ll deal with Ryssand and Tasmôrden. But I can’t take you onto the field, and most especially I can’t defend myself wondering whether you’re safe back in my camp, or held hostage in Ryssand’s.”

“I’m not a fool!”

“Nor am I! And not being one I can’t divide my attention—don’t argue with me, not in this. You know I’m right. If you’re there I’ll be thinking of you, no other thing. I know you’ll be suffering all the worry I’d suffer if you were there. But that’s your part to suffer, mine to ask it, or I won’t have my wits about me—Hear me! I’m king, and it’s my damned army! Go to Efanor!”

She said nothing. She held to him. He routinely lost arguments when she said nothing. But this time he would not yield, and he waited, and waited.

“I’ll go to Amefel,” she said, prying herself from his arms, and with a rustle of the paper she had abused with her holding him, spread her hand on it, smoothed it.

He had not thought at first of Amefel. But it was fortified. Its people were Bryaltines. Tristen ruled it, and had the loyalty of the people.

It was a better choice. And hardly farther away. Assurnbrook was a deep and treacherous river, once it received the flow of Arreyburn on its way north to the Lenúalim—that was one reason no bridge had ever stood in its shifting sands and soft banks, and the other the fact that Murandys had had no interest in linking itself to Amefel. But Assurnford was not that far south of their camp here, and once across that, Ninévrisë would immediately be in a Bryalt land, safe even in the countryside—not risking the mood of Guelen villages, who, no, would not be pleased that the woman for whom Guelenmen went to war was going back to safety.

He did not mention that hazard, knowing how it would sting her pride: it stung his that his own people were so inclined to hate her. But he did know a better choice when she laid it before him: safe from the time she crossed the Assurn, not having to brazen it out with the banners and Idrys’ authority or slip into Guelemara cloaked and by night, simply to reach the Guelesfort in safety.

“Idrys will see you there.”

“Idrys won’t,” she said. “For one thing, he won’t leave you.”

“He’ll do it if I order it,” he said, “and if he wants Ryssand’s head, which he does. More than that—he serves the Marhanen. And you carry the Marhanen heir.” Then it crossed his mind that where he sent her, Tarien was, and she had to confront that situation. “Tarien’s there.”

“So is Tristen. And Emuin. Tarien doesn’t frighten me. Nothing there frightens me.”

“Then you’ll go tonight. Now. We’ll make as little fuss about this as we can.” Her sickness had troubled her, at the Guelesfort and on the march, and she had endured her misery and forced down soldiers’ fare, refusing to have anything more delicate. He had lost all his arguments until now, and he took no chances. “A soldier’s tent, a packhorse, Idrys and four men and their gear. Can you do it?”

The rain rushed against the walls of the tent. The river would be up, and the crossing at Assurnford itself an ice-cold flood of snowmelt. He knew what a misery that soaking ford might be. But Idrys knew the crossing in all its treachery, and he would get them to safety.

“I’ve no doubt,” Ninévrisë said, and Cefwyn held her tightly, wanting nothing more than to have her with him and nothing less than to see her in a town where no harm would possibly come near her.

“Before the sun’s up,” he said. “With no fuss, no delay. Idrys will want to come back, and I won’t forbid it. I’ll see you after this is over, in Ilefínian.”

“In Ilefínian,” she said. “Don’t worry for me. Guard yourself. Do whatever you need to do. Say I’ve gone to the capital: there’ll be less talk, and if trouble comes after us, it’ll take the wrong road.”

“Wise lady.”

“Promise me: don’t let Ryssand’s men near you. Set him near any engagement: let him bear the brunt of any encounter.—And carry my banner with you.”

They had planned the advance from the river through provinces that might be favorable to Ninévrisë. All those plans were cast to the winds, and her banner by all custom should not fly if she were not there: but custom be damned, he had no difficulty agreeing to it, if it saved them fighting Ninévrisë’s loyal subjects and killing honest men.

“I will,” he promised her. “All I do, I do in your name.”

“I’ll launch rumor north from Henas’amef, with Tristen.”

“See you don’t launch yourself,” he said, for he had a sudden apprehension of her finding Elwynim forces inside Amefel, and the temptation it would be to her.

“Trust me,” she said, “as I trust you to take my capital.”

“I’ve no choice,” he said. “And I swear to you that banner will fly.”

They made a silent farewell then, a lovers’ farewell, with the storm flickering and roaring beyond the tent walls, and the rain pouring down.

After that he waked Idrys, and Idrys listened, expressionless, to the plans they had.

“I’ll be riding back,” Idrys said, as he had known Idrys would say.

“There’ll be no trouble tracking us,” Cefwyn said in grim humor. “I trust you’ll find me, crow: you never do miss trouble.”

CHAPTER 5

After the deluge of rain came the west wind, from the evening of Tristen’s day, blowing the clouds from the sky and warming the last piles of snow, drying the fields and banging at loose shutters. The banners atop the South Gate flew straight out, and the pigeons when they came to the window had hard work to maintain their places.

They were still as many as before: Tristen counted them as he did every day, worrying about Owl’s appetite, and still they stayed safe.

And still Tarien’s babe stayed safe, and slept, as Uwen assured him new babies did, and nursed and slept and slept some more. Gran Sedlyn refused to leave, having mislaid the baby once: she slept close by on the night of that day, and tended Tarien and Elfwyn both. It was passing strange to Tristen that now he must think of a new soul, a creature that had never existed before, but there he was, indisputably a baby.

As for Orien, she lay where she had died, and no one wanted to go into that fire-blackened cell. That very day, and on Emuin’s advice, Tristen sent for masons to wall up the guardhouse, from the stairs on down. It was simple work, requiring no great time to accomplish it. And when it was finished, he and Emuin both had warded it, for the sake of Tarien’s soul, and Elfwyn’s, and to give Orien’s spirit what rest it might find—but Tristen doubted she wished peace at all.

Orien had lit her own funeral pyre that night. Shut behind the cell’s iron door, guarded by men in the hall above, she had still, found an escape, a way for her spirit to go walking, cut free from her bonds—so she had imagined, to seize a new home in Tarien’s body, but she had failed in that attempt. She had attempted to escape the wards altogether, riding an intruder spirit’s will, and to fly all the way clear; but she had become lost, left behind. The wards had thrust her ambitious soul back into the cell from which it had extended itself—and now with the new wall and the wards, Tristen hoped they had bound it there, bound it and sealed it in such a way it would never escape.

But there was still a danger from the old mews. If some power came in by that and breached the wards there, then Orien might have help to free herself—for she had made herself a Shadow, and a dangerous one, potent and quick—dangerous especially to Tarien.

Tarien had rejected her sister’s influence, had defended herself with unexpected strength, and utterly cast her out, terrified at what desire she now saw—but she had weak moments. She had ambitious moments. And she remained vulnerable to Orien’s desires, a woman who mothered Cefwyn’s son, and on whom they had to rely.

In the meanwhile, however, the contrary weather seemed now not to resist his wishes. The roads were drying, he knew from messages that Cevulirn’s men were well established, and now he took it on faith that Cefwyn would do as he said and march to the river.

So he had done. But Tristen lingered here, waiting and waiting for a message from Cefwyn.

For the pride of the northern barons, Cefwyn had said, they must go first across the river.

But for the friendship that was between the two of them, Tristen believed a letter would come, and that from that letter he would learn things he needed to know.

So for two days more he found things to occupy him, the questions of supply, of weather damage, of disputes over scarce resources; and questions, too, of master Emuin, who would not march with the army. Emuin continued his scrutiny of the heavens and his consultation of dice. From time to time he made inquiries of master Haman on the behavior of horses and stable mice—and made them again, while Paisi had caught a mouse in the lower hall, and kept it in a cage: about that matter, Tristen had no understanding, but the mouse ate well, and took water from a silver dish.

The pond thawed, and the fish waked from their winter sleep. Amid all his more serious concerns, Tristen took them bread crumbs, and saw with delight that the small birds had come back to the barren trees in the garden.

Yet all of this filled a time of waiting—waiting for word from Cefwyn, worrying for what he knew of Ryssand’s purposes, wondering what use Cefwyn might have made of what he could send to

Ninévrisë… or whether Ninévrisë’ might have heard his messages at all; wondering whether Anwyll had reached the capital yet, and whether he was safe, and whether he had reached Idrys without incident. Of all messengers he could send, surely no one would assail a captain of the Dragons at the head of his company—and surely he would have a message soon, telling him he was free to cross the river.

But the third afternoon the gate bell rang, startling the pigeons into flight, a sudden wall of gray wings obscuring the sky, beating aloft; and at that iron sound of the bell his heart rose up, the same, and he quickly shut the window and latched it, caught up his sword and his cloak before his servants closed about him to put both on him, and was out the door of his apartment, papers and signatures and petitions of town nobles forgotten.

He was sure it was the messenger he awaited. He knew that Emuin was in his tower, that Tarien was in her room asleep: all these persons he was always aware of.

But he was suddenly astonished to understand that Ninévrisë wanted him, and was thinking of him at this very moment.

He stopped on the stairs in midstride, alarmed, casting about him to know what mischance had let him and Ninévrisë touch, so far apart, and whether dangerous wizardry had hurled them together: she felt so unaccustomedly strong, and distressed, and glad, and close…

She was at his own town gate.

He hurried down the stairs with his concomitant racket of guards and weapons overtaking him from behind—Uwen was elsewhere, about his duties, but Gweyl and the others were with him; and letting them follow as best they could he half ran down the lower hall to the west doors and out to the stable yard.

There he spied a stableboy with a sorrel horse at lead.

“Is he fit?” he asked the boy, who stammered yes, and without any regard of ownership or the boy’s destination, he took the lead and with both hands vaulted onto the sorrel’s bare back. “It’s no great concern,” he said to Gweyl and the guards, who had caught up. “Wait here!”

Those were certainly not their standing orders from Uwen; but Ninévrisë was already on her way uphill, and Tristen was in no mood to wait for saddles and four more horses. He turned the horse to the gate and rode out on the instant onto the street and down, bareheaded, bannerless, but bound for answers and an appearance he had never looked to see come to him.

At the midtown crossing he saw the weary visitors coming uphill, a rider in a muddy blue cloak—Ninévrisë—in the lead, with, of all men, Idrys, and ten guardsmen in plain armor, mud-spattered to a brown, dusty sameness with their horses.

Had Cefwyn come south to join him? he asked himself, with a dizzying flood of hopes and fears—together they could do anything, overcome the north, accomplish all his hopes—but if Cefwyn came south it meant calamity with the northern provinces.

And it was only Ninévrisë, only Idrys, which frightened him beyond words.

He rode up to Ninévrisë’s heartfelt and weary gladness to see him, and the gray space opened, pouring out everything to him: her pain, her distress, his letter, his warning; and Cefwyn days advanced on the road to Elwynor… none of these things with words, and none in order, and all with her exhaustion and fear. He was as dazed at this Unfolding of dangers as if the sky had opened on him.

“Tristen,” she said aloud, reaching out her hand. “Oh, Tristen!”

“Is Cefwyn safe?”

“To our knowledge,” Idrys said in his low, calm voice. “He bade me bring Her Grace to Henas’amef for safety, but the roads so delayed us I looked to find you on the road north by now.”

“I waited for his message, sir.”

“None reached you?”

“No,” he said, dismayed.

“One should have. I’ll be off,” Idrys said, “this hour, with the loan of horses.”

“With the gift of anything you need,” Tristen said fervently. “But what message should have come? And did Cefwyn not get mine, with Anwyll?”

“None from Anwyll,” Idrys said, and by now they were riding side by side, bound uphill, with the curious stares of townfolk all around them. “But His Majesty will be at the river by now, and Anwyll may have to go there.”

“Sir, Tasmôrden’s plotting with Ryssand!”

“That, he knows.”

“The letter told me,” Ninévrisë said. “Your letter, the magical one. Only I fear—I fear it didn’t tell me everything, and there might have been news there for days that I didn’t hear until the news about the baby.”

He had never been sure it would tell her anything at all. He was vastly relieved to know that not all his efforts had gone astray, and he saw in what had gone amiss no mere chance, but a hostile wizardry.

And whose wizardry it was, since Elfwyn’s birth, he now was sure.

“When we reach the Zeide,” he said, “I’ll tell you all of it. And I pray you wait, sir, and tell me everything that was in Cefwyn’s letter. I’ll order horses and supplies, all you need. But I need your advice, what I should do.”

Riders were coming toward them at a fair speed, Uwen Lewen’s-son, with Gweyl and the rest, and Lusin, all of them astonished to see who had arrived.

But they all knew how to take things in stride, and meeting them, simply reined about calmly and rode with them, without a question, while the townsfolk on the street that stood and watched did so in a certain solemnity, not sure what it all meant, perhaps, but knowing that visitors had come. Enough of them surely recognized Ninévrisë, and even more surely, the Lord Commander; and their arrival in such grim, unlordly guise must start rumors running the streets… rumors of danger to the kingdom, perhaps even of defeat in the north and disaster to Cefwyn… Tristen had feared the same in his own heart, had no doubt the townsfolk would fear the same—even that Uwen and his guard might guess Ninévrisë’s appearance with Idrys portended calamity.

So at the crest of the hill, in the open square, Tristen turned the borrowed horse about to face the straggling curious in the street and gave them the things he could tell them.

“King Cefwyn’s army has moved against Earl Tasmôrden! He’s requested us to safeguard the Lady Regent, and so we will! Her Grace of Elwynor, our guest and ally, with the Lord Commander, her escort—the Lord Commander will rejoin the king, in Elwynor!”

A cheer went up at that report, relief on all the faces.

“Wise,” Idrys said in his low, travel-worn voice, “and a wonder to the people of Henas’amef to be so trusted by His Majesty, to be sure.”

That ironic observation might be the underlying truth, but the people waved in unfeigned jubilation, and with the bells ringing and the echoing commotion outside, Tristen brought his small party inside the gates.

“The Lord Commander and his men are riding back immediately,” he said to Uwen, and to Lusin, sliding down from the sorrel’s bare back. A boy ran up to reclaim the horse, and now Tristen saw Tassand had hurried out into the nippish air and down onto the west door steps, ill dressed for the chill wind: “Her Grace is our guest, Tassand.”

Those three he needed tell, and everything else happened—boys running for ponies to ride down after remounts, master Haman shouting, and Tassand hurrying up the steps as fast as his agile legs would carry him. Lusin, too, dispatched messengers with the necessary instructions for others of the staff, all of this in motion before they had reached the steps. Tristen promised supplies, clean clothes, hot baths if the men would wait that long.

“We have no time,” was Idrys’ protest, but Tristen swept Ninévrisë and the Lord Commander at once up the steps and inside. Down the hall only a short distance he brought them into the old great hall, far more intimate than the newer one the other side of the stairs, and nearer the kitchens. Servants whisked chairs into position, moved a small table, and had a pitcher of wine and a steaming teapot and service ready almost before they could settle in the chairs—and immediately after that a cold meat pie, cold bread, cheese, and sausage. The servants were hard-breathing, his guests a little dazed by the instant flood of amenities, but Cook had learned since Cevulirn had gone to the river that Tristen’s messengers and his friends arrived ravenous and left with bags and wallets stuffed with food, and every such arrival met this hospitality unasked and unadvised.

Hot herbal tea and honey met instantaneous approval.

“Her Grace is carrying the heir to the kingdom,” Idrys said, first of all, to Tristen’s dismay. “And has risked a great deal in coming this far.”

“I’m very well,” Ninévrisë said shortly, cherishing a warm cup in hands pale-edged beneath the spatters of mud.

Another prince, leapt immediately into Tristen’s essential understanding, though why he should think son scarcely skimmed his wits. He had not heard the child as he heard Tarien’s, but he had no disposition to doubt it.

“This message,” she said. “This message of yours, and Cefwyn’s…”

“Cenas carried it,” Idrys said, “with the king’s writ and seal. And had ample time to be here.”

“He’s not come,” Tristen reiterated.

Uwen had joined them cautiously: he was bidden listen to all councils. “Gedd,” Uwen said now in a quiet voice, and drew a darting glance from Ninévrisë and Idrys.

“Sergeant Gedd carried Cefwyn’s last message,” Tristen said, well understanding, “and was days late. He had to let go his horses and hide and move by night: he was followed out of Guelemara.”

“Two of my men never came back from that ride,” Idrys said. “Now Cenas. And he left without fuss.”

“Gedd weren’t clear of the town before they were on ‘im,” Uwen said. “I think ye should hear Gedd, sir.”

“There’s no time,” Idrys said, “not an hour.—Send him with me, I’ll hear him and send him back again as we ride.”

“With no difficulty,” Tristen said quietly.

“What’s this about Ryssand?” Idrys asked him. “What do you know?”

He began to reply, and only then realized the Lord Commander might believe in his walking through walls, but would not understand it. “There’s a doorway of sorts, where the old mews were. And it goes to places. Ynefel is one. But the lord of Meiden overheard a hall in Ilefínian, where wizards and Tasmôrden and his men were holding council.”

“The lord of Meiden.”

“Crissand,” Tristen said. “They know about Lady Tarien’s baby; that’s one thing. And Hasufin isn’t dispelled.”

“The wizard.” Idrys knew precisely what wizard, what trouble, and that it presaged nothing good. Ninévrisë knew, and it was two troubled looks he had. “Lewenbrook didn’t suffice, then.”

“It sufficed,” Tristen said, “to drive him back, but he tried again, and I think he’s with Tasmôrden.”

“Grim news,” Idrys said.

“But he didn’t break through, here,” Tristen said, offering the best news he had on that matter. “He tried to take Tarien’s baby, the way he did the prince at Althalen…”

“Oh, dear gods,” Ninévrisë said, and her hand flew to her heart.

“But he didn’t,” Tristen said quickly, seeing what distress it brought her. “It didn’t happen. Orien’s dead. She tried to help him, and she tried to get free, but she couldn’t, and she died. Hasufin’s still in question, but he isn’t here. The baby is safe.”

“Dear gods,” Ninévrisë said again.

“Came here,” Idrys said darkly. “How? Like what happened on the field?”

Tristen shook his head. “More quietly. The wards wouldn’t let him in. There’s the gap in the wards where the old mews were; there’s another at Ilefínian…”

“And he came from there?”

“Not from there,” Tristen said, “but he was there, at least . . • he had influence there.”

Idrys’ face, unwashed, spattered with mud and filmed with dust, seemed carved of stone, the lively flick of a dark eye the only expression.

“He seems to have influence many places, Amefel.”

“He does.”

“And the earl of Meiden overheard this plot.”

“He and I,” Tristen said. “Tasmôrden knew about Tarien’s baby, and sent Lord Cuthan to Ryssand, to make trouble.”

“That he did,” Idrys said.

“But more than that,” Tristen said, “Ryssand’s agreed to kill Cefwyn. That’s what I sent with Anwyll. Cefwyn mustn’t let Ryssand’s men near him.”

“That the letter told me,” Ninévrisë said in anguish. “And Cefwyn knows it… but late. I don’t know how I know, but I did learn it late, didn’t I? I felt it, the farther I rode… part of it was late! And if he’d known—if he’d known when Ryssand was in court—”

“Wizardry,” Tristen said. “The weather—everything’s gone back and forth, from what I wish, what Tasmôrden’s wizardry wishes, wherever it comes from.”

“Wizardry indeed,” Idrys said darkly, “and I belong with my king.”

“I don’t wish to keep you,” Tristen said, “but let Uwen come with Gedd, too, since Uwen’s heard all we’ve done here. They’ll ride with you as far as you need. Cevulirn is already at the river, with Sovrag and Umanon. Pelumer’s rangers are wherever they need be, not mentioning Aeself’s band, Elwynim, who watch up and down the river. All our supplies are in place: we can be across the river in one night and reach Ilefínian in three.”

“Do you say so?” Ninévrisë said, as if all the weight of days on the road had lifted. Rarely, too, did Idrys’ grim countenance ever show his heart, but his relief in hearing that was visible in every line of him.

“Well done.” Then, more sharply, as if a thought had come to him. “Sovrag’s there, you say. With boats.”

“One boat, always, if not others.”

“Can he set me ashore at the Murandys bridge? Can he possibly ferry the horses?”

“I don’t know. One man, two—with horses. Perhaps.”

Idrys gnawed his lip, doubtless weighing the risks involved and the fact that once at Anwyll’s camp, there was no other way but the river or the roads on the far side of the bridge—but a vast stony dome and a meander of deep woods lay between the bridge at Anwyll’s camp and that bridge Cefwyn would use to cross into Elwynor: Tristen had seen those hills not in the flesh but in his dreams of Owl, a jagged maze of rock and forest on both sides of the river, rough land that had been the saving of Ninévrisë’ and her father, and of no few men this winter who had escaped Ilefínian—but nowhere in it were trails fit for horses: Idrys and Ninévrisë had surely come here by the longer way round, down by Assurnford, to make any time at all.

And to escape that long swing south by a fast ride north to the camp and a windblown course upriver to Cefwyn’s bridge… indeed, if Sovrag could, it would save time.

“The winds I may wish you,” Tristen said, “but only as well as I’ve wished the weather, which is sometimes good and sometimes not—the winds might be foul for days, and I don’t know how many horses they can manage, or even if they can. But I know Elwynim have crossed with their horses, northerly, by swimming. It’s a great risk.”

“If not the boats, then the swim,” Idrys said. “Afoot until I can find a horse. Cefwyn expects you to come with all your force, as soon as you can. And to protect Her Grace.”

“I’ll ride after you as soon as tonight.—Emuin is here,” he said to Ninévrisë. “Stay with him. Tassand will take care of anything you wish.”

“I have no doubts of either of them,” Ninévrisë said.

“Uwen will go as far as need be, then. We’ve signals among us, for the rangers. He’ll show you. And when you come there, sir, tell Cevulirn secure the far side: I’ll be there, perhaps before he can cross.”

“M’lord,” Uwen said faintly, “you’ll be takin’ only the new lads wi’ ye.”

“I’ll be safe,” Tristen said, with no doubt in his mind, and Idrys took the moment, grimy hands and all, to take a quarter cup of wine and a morsel of bread and cheese.

“I’ll get me kit,” Uwen said, rising, “by ‘r leave, m’lord, and I’ll bring Gedd.”

“Half an hour, Captain,” Idrys said.

“Yes, sir,” Uwen said, and left quickly. Tassand took that departure for a signal to come in and report Ninévris딑s accommodation ready.

“I’ll enjoy the tea so long as it’s here,” Ninévrisë said, cradling the cup in muddy fingers. “And thank you: I’ll be grateful.”

She was at the end of the strength she had, and sustaining herself in the gray space: Tristen had been aware of that failing, and lent strength of his own, steadying, wary of Tarien’s existence above— and aware suddenly of another presence, nearer, at the door.

Owl flew in, eliciting a motion of fright from Ninévrisë; and immediately after Owl, came Emuin.

Ninévrisë held out a trembling, anticipating hand, and Emuin took it like a courtier, pressed it in his.

“Safe,” Emuin said. “You slipped up on us. Slipped up on me, wily that you are, and that’s no mild achievement. We had no idea you were coming.”

“You know what’s happened,” Ninévrisë said.

“I’ve heard,” Emuin said. “Unfortunately, so has the Aswydd girl, I fear, but no matter, no matter, you’re here and Cefwyn’s other advisor…” With a glance toward Idrys. “… is soon on his way back, I gather.”

“You gather the truth,” Idrys said, and washed down a bite. “As fast as horses can move us.” He rose, a tall, daunting presence. “I fear, Your Grace, someone’s followed my men, picked off my messengers, and my lord’s couriers, and known in each instance when and where they’d be.”

They all looked at him.

“What do you mean?” Ninévrisë asked. “Ryssand?”

“Ryssand’s treachery, ultimately. But you say Gedd was followed. Now Cenas hasn’t come. It wasn’t for lack of secrecy. But secrecy’s failed us. Either it’s wizardry, which is not a talent among my men or Ryssand’s, or the culprit doesn’t get his knowledge out of thin air, but from councils.”

“Who?” Tristen asked.

“Someone within my circles.—If you’re the wizard you say, master grayrobe, wizard me this, and tell me who is the traitor.”

Tristen stood still. Owl had landed on a chair arm, and folded his wings as Emuin considered the question in the gray space and out. Tristen did so, too, thinking of all the officers who came and went, and all the pages and servants.

“I assure you I’ll consider the question, master crow,” Emuin said. “If I find an answer I’ll send it to Tristen. He knows how fast.”

“I’ll be to a horse,” Idrys said shortly, “and do the things I know to do. I’ll reach him. Your leave.”

Idrys was on his way to gather resources in a fortress he had lived in for a year and more, and where he knew well where to look. Tristen delayed for Emuin, and Ninévrisë.

“I’ll just sip my tea,” Ninévrisë said. Her hands were trembling.

“A hot bath, a clean gown, and I assure you gentlemen I’ll be very well.”

“Idrys will reach him,” Tristen said.

“I’ve no doubt of the Lord Commander.”

“Best you go upstairs,” Emuin said. “Let the servants put you to bed. They’ll bring you tea.”

“I prefer present company.” There was a certain distractedness about Ninévrisë, a fragile grasp of the world around her, a fear of solitude, and of the halls above, where a presence haunted the gray space. “How does Lady Tarien? Is she well?”

“Well,” Tristen said. “She won’t trouble you.”

“A prisoner?”

“Not free,” Tristen said, “not free to come and go, but where her choices lie, I’ve not asked her.”

“And the child?”

“Thrives,” said Emuin. “The lady dotes on him, will not leave him; I ask Your Grace bear with her and the child under this roof, awkward as it is. There’s no place else safe to send them.”

The gray space seethed with Ninévrisë’s troubled presence, and with a well-banked anger. “She tried to kill Cefwyn; wished me dead; has my husband’s son—I take these things, understand, with what feeling you might expect. But likewise I take your meaning. I understand Orien is dead. But dead here, within the wards. Is that safe?”

“Warded,” Emuin said, “as warded as we can manage. But you should know the babe is gifted. And his dreams we also ward and treat gently.”

“I bear the baby no ill will at all,” Ninévrisë said faintly, a breath across the teacup. She emptied it. “Might there be another cup, if you please? I’ve suffered from thirst as much as cold—the wind was bitter.”

Tristen poured it for her himself, and she warmed her hands with it, after a sip.

“Did you fear anything?” Emuin asked her pointedly. “On the road, did anything threaten you?”

“Not in that way. It was a harder ride than I thought. I wouldn’t stop, and Idrys wouldn’t, and between us, and as much as the horses could bear, we just kept going.” She lifted the cup in both dirty, trembling hands and had a sip. “The women’s court in Guelemara had Ryssand’s daughter and Murandys’ niece. I assure you Tarien Aswydd doesn’t daunt me in the least.”

“Her Grace also,” Tristen said, lest Emuin have failed to know, “has Cefwyn’s son.”

Ninévrisë cast him up a sudden, sharp glance, the cup clutched between her hands. “A son. I think so. Is it certain?”

It was nothing he could define, but he still thought so, and did not even perceive a presence yet. It was in the currents of wizardry that ran strong and deep in all he saw, everywhere about the place. A child of Orien’s wizardry had come to be in this place: here was one of the other side—

And yet neither was necessarily an enemy to the other. It was not utter misfortune that he had delayed here to safeguard the one child, instead of waiting for Cefwyn’s message with Cevulirn, at the river… a message that they now feared was lost. Three months ago he had had difficulty imagining things to come, and now he had diverted the enemy’s current into his own hands, and seen far enough down the river he could say—yes, a son, another son, and to know that was acceptable. There was nothing else he could say of it, no word he could use, but acceptable, against all other forces loose in the world.

It said nothing, however, of Cefwyn’s safety, and Idrys’ fear. If Cefwyn had an enemy closer to him than Tasmôrden or Ryssand, that was outside his reach—and inside someone else’s, where the old, old current that was Hasufin might after all prove stronger, or quicker, or simply overwhelm him and all he protected there.

He had first discovered fear in Ynefel’s maze of walks and shadows. He had first met nameless terror in the loft where he had found Owl, and explored apprehension and unease under Mama’s shadow. None of these Words was new to him—but the knowledge that ruin could be so absolute and so sweep everything he loved with it, in one stroke, against one man—this indignation, this anger wrapped in fear he had never felt in all his life. Moderation had no place in what he felt, and he did not know the depths in himself this might reach.

But two sets of eyes read more of him than he might wish—both with the gift, both of them reaching into the gray space, and wishing his restraint.

“Young lord,” Emuin said, the only man but Mauryl who could chide him and call him a fool, “don’t forget yourself. I fear there’s more and worse to find. But you know more now than then. You may be more now than before. The Year of Years is at its beginning this time. This is your age. The last, I fear, wasn’t Mauryl’s after all. It wasn’t Hasufin’s, either, by the narrowest of escapes.—And damned certain, this one isn’t mine.”

Ninévrisë looked bewildered at this exchange… her lineage endmost of all those who had ruled in these lands, the Elwynim and the Guelenfolk.

The Amefin aethelings, Crissand’s folk, were older… not by much, but older than the Sihhë’s presence in the south, Tristen knew it not alone from his books, but from the dark that kept Unfolding under his feet.

Emuin himself in his studies had reached as far as the stars could show him, as far as Mauryl had taught him.

There was Auld Syes, who warded Althalen. She was old as the hills were old, and said almost as little—what could one say, who watched the currents move, for whom the years were a vast and endless stream?

All… all of that stream flowed past him in the blink of an eye.

“Pity Orien,” he said, strangely moved, and drew a breath too large for his body. “She had no knowledge. She never knew anything at all.”

Emuin laid a hand on his shoulder, only that.

Ninévrisë said nothing, only looked at both of them, the teacup forgotten in her hands. She was there, in the gray space, and heard, but whether any of it at all fell within her understanding Tristen could not tell.

He only had to go, now, and be sure of his defenses, around what he left. He feared more than ever in his life. The enemy had no mercy, and no alternative but to meet him: the enemy feared the same as he, and would strike at anything outside his wards.

The enemy would strike first at those the loss of whom would most damage, most wound him, most drive him to anger.

The enemy, like Cefwyn, had already moved.

CHAPTER 6

Ninévrisë slept. That was best,

Tristen thought. Uwen was on his way to the river with Idrys, and that was well, too, for Uwen could only worry, otherwise… although in the task at hand he missed Uwen’s sure hands and his calming steadiness.

Instead he called on Lusin and Gweyl to arm him. It was an upside-down order of things, arming him before the guard in the barracks was under arms, before midnight, but his bodyguard never questioned, sure that they were riding to the river before dawn, sure that the stable was gathering up horses and that messengers were out to the barracks and the fires were lit on the hills, advising every Amefin lord. It was the call they all had expected since Cevulirn had marched, and expected hourly since Ninévrisë and her party had arrived.

Lusin, who would not go to war with him, looked regretful in that knowledge; but he had his duties. “You’ll command the garrison that remains,” Tristen said to him. “Prushan will give you all the help you may need,” Prushan, a reasonable and sensible man, was too old to ride to the river, even to sit a horse behind the lines, and would provide the lordly authority in town. “And he’ll need your advice. Give it to him as you do to me.”

“I wish to the gods I was going with ye, m’lord. All of us. We still hoped we would.”

“I need you here more than in the line,” Tristen said. “You know that I do. Emuin will be at his wizardry and maybe here and maybe there… I fear Paisi will know more of what’s happening downstairs than he will. Worst, if there’s danger of wizardry… of sorcery breaking out, Emuin will know what to do for that, but he can’t watch his own back and he can’t settle disputes in the hall. Her Grace is here. She’s wise in most things and she has wizardry of her own… ask her if you find yourself at a loss, but she mustn’t risk herself or draw attention. There’s Lady Tarien and the baby, both with the gift… you’ll have them to watch, and don’t trust her: she’s an open doorway. Anything can walk through it, and you have only master Emuin and Her Grace to deal with what does. Lord Prushan’s able to deal with the town, but the Zeide itself—you understand it.”

“Enough to be cold scairt, m’lord, an’ that’s the truth.”

“Enough to stand your ground,” he said. “As you would on the field. You’d fight there. So you will here, protecting what’s here. And watching that place in the hall—that most of all. You and Syllan, and Aran and Tawwys—I want one of you four, none else, to be at that place day and night: take turns. And set the abbot to watch the wall at the guardroom stairs, where Orien is, turn about with the Teranthine father. If at any time whoever’s on watch doesn’t think things are right with those places, send for Emuin, and don’t wait.”

“As things could break out there.”

“As things could break out there,” he said. “At any hour. Paisi’s not a bad one to have on watch with you, where Emuin can spare him. He has the gift. Just don’t let him watch alone. And above all else, don’t let Tarien and don’t let Her Grace near those two places.”

“I’m to tell her no?” Clearly Lusin doubted his ability.

“Say that I said so.” He clapped Lusin on the shoulder, no longer servant, but a friend, and a trusted officer. “Go now to Crissand’s house. Tell him he’ll ride with me in the morning. Don’t let him in the lower hall.”

Lusin’s expression grew distressed. He was never inclined to argue with orders, but he understood, then, that he, too, was being sent off to a distance and he liked very little what he guessed.

“Go,” Tristen said.

“Aye, m’lord,” Lusin said, clearly struggling with the urge to say something. He hesitated on his way to the door. “Ye want us’t’ be back here, m’lord?”

“No. Don’t let Lord Crissand follow me,” he said. “Whatever you have to do, see he stays away from the mews.—Send him to Emuin, if he argues.”

“Ye ain’t goin’ after another banner, m’lord.”

“No. Not this time.” Lusin appealed to him to trust him; and he cast himself on that trust. “It’s Efanor I want. I’m going to warn him of the danger to his brother and set him a task the same as I

give you. But I mustn’t make a mistake in this. If Crissand tries to follow me, I don’t know that I can protect us both, or find the way for him. Now go.”

“M’lord,” Lusin said, and went, well knowing that his lord was at risk, and not happy in being sent away.

But it was necessary, what he did. Tristen knew that as surely as if it had Unfolded, for Cefwyn’s back was undefended, and the doors that all led to the mews were undefended. He was not utterly sure a path led into Guelemara, but the gray space was everywhere, one could surely reach it everywhere, and tangled as it might be—where the Lines of a place failed, there the walls between the gray space and the world of Men were weak.

And if a place on the earth had ever afflicted his senses in the same way the mews did, the misaligned Lines within the Quinaltine itself defined that place.

There must be a way through, there; and it was that place he sought, both to warn Efanor, the simple reason he had given Lusin— and to mend those Lines before they afforded a passage for the enemy into the very heart of Cefwyn’s capital.

To protect the mews from such an invasion he had taken such precautions as he dared. He had warned Emuin and Ninévrisë of his intention because he was sure they could not prevent him. And now he sent Lusin with his message, so late that by the time Crissand could even reach the mews, he would have done what he set himself to do—for, give or take the war of the weather, and considering the craft and strength of the enemy, he knew he had a remarkable run of that mystery Uwen called Luck, that quantity he saw as a stream of opportunity flowing their way.

That favorable current was back again tonight: the winds in the heavens served him and cleared the roads, and Her Grace had warned Cefwyn and reached him. But as with swordplay, the enemy might allow the pattern a while, only to create false confidence… and he would not press this luck of Uwen’s by casting Crissand’s rash, brave presence directly into Hasufin’s reach, on unfavorable ground.

The new guards by his door at night, Amefin, had one advantage over Lusin and his old friends, and even over Gweyl and his comrades: they were far less forward to charge after him on their own initiative. He went down the hall, down the stairs, and past the closed great hall as if he were going to Emuin’s tower, with only two of the Amefin in attendance, and descended into the lower corri-dor where the servants had left only the single candles burning in the sconces.

Owl came winging past him, from whatever perch he had occupied. He had wondered would Owl agree with him, and Owl evidently did—Owl swooped down the hall ahead of him to the disquiet of the young men of his guard.

He had envisioned willing the Lines into his sight and the wards opening for him in an orderly, careful process; he had envisioned alerting Emuin, in the moments before he went, to keep his intentions out of the gray space as long as possible.

But the instant Owl reached that part of the hall the Lines were there and the old mews showed itself without his will, blue and rustling with wings; and into that vision Owl glided, away and away into the blue depths.

—Emuin! he had time to think.

But only that. Owl, contrary bird, had chosen a path of his own without his wishing it, and he followed, as follow he must…

The light became gray, sunlight falling aslant through familiar tumbled beams.

He was at Ynefel, not Guelemara… and wanting Guelemara, he wandered and stumbled instead through the ruin of Ynefel’s lower hall.

He was immediately put out with Owl. He had no imminent sense of the enemy’s presence, but he knew the enemy might lurk anywhere and knew if he went delving into one place and the other, it only increased his chances of encountering danger.

Hasufin had held this place… had been born here, perhaps, and this shattered hall was more likely a haunt than most. Ynefel was first, a place old, and enchanted long ago, walls more ancient than any existence he had had.

That was the peculiar strangeness the mews evoked. He was never conscious of himself as being old, but he knew in his bones what was older than his presence in this land. And Ynefel was one such Place, a tether for strayed, damned souls.

Shadows ran here, the dead, he had come to understand, of lost Galasien, not of Men. All around him, he saw the faces locked in Ynefel’s walls, stone faces that had seemed at night to move in the trick of a passing candle.

Three in particular stood at the corner above, where the stairs had turned. The wooden stairs had fallen, but as he looked up he saw them still watching, one seeming horrified, and one angry, the third at this remove seeming to drowse in disinterest.

He blinked and shivered, and was suddenly in the courtyard of Ynefel, looking back at the door, where Mauryl’s face had joined the rest.

Mauryl looked outward and elsewhere, seeming blind to him now, disinterested.

Owl flew past, and he was glad to look away. Any sight was better than Mauryl’s disregard of him. He followed Owl, angry, determined that Owl should lead him now where he would…

He blinked and stood under the open night sky, among ruins that glowed blue with spectral fire. This was Uleman’s handiwork… in Althalen.

Not here, either, he said to Owl, angry and desperate.

Time meant nothing in the gray space. An eye might have blinked in the world of Men; the sun might have risen. He could ill afford Owl’s whims, willed him to lead true, and still Owl evaded him, and led him past a line of blue fire, the Line of a ruined palace.

Doggedly he shaped the strong blue Lines of the Quinaltine in his thoughts. He remembered that tangled set of Lines within them, remembered them down to the smell of the incense, the sound of the singing.

He stopped with his foot on a step, and beneath that step was no slight fall. The Edge was under it, and he could all but hear the crack of Mauryl’s staff, his stern reprimand to know where his feet were—flesh as well as spirit.

Flesh had obligations, and hazards, and he had risked too much overrushing Owl, thinking he knew where he was going. He meekly wished the bird back to him, and stood patiently until he felt the brush of Owl’s wing above his hair.

To the left, or what passed for left: there was the place of smoke and incense. He stood where the Holy Father had stood, the last time he had been in this place.

Above him was the roof the lightning had riven.

Behind his back was the hallowed place with the mismatched Lines, the trap for Shadows.

They seethed in a mass here, many, many Shadows roiling in confusion at the intersections of those Lines, Shadows trapped within the vicinity of the Quinaltine, forced over the centuries to endure prayers to gods they did not acknowledge, the gods of those who had usurped their power. Angry, frustrated and frightened, they ran along the rails, down beneath the altar. They flowed away like spots of ink, they skittered into the masonry, and under benches.

There was no sound here until he took a step, the scrape of metal-guarded leather on stone.

Tristen drew a sharp breath, perceiving another presence. Owl flew toward the doors, and up, and up.

And of a sudden a fierce crash of metal rang from the left of the shrine to echo to the heights: a priest in the columned side aisle had dropped a great platter, and fell to his knees, and to his face.

“I came to speak with Prince Efanor,” Tristen said, and that priest scrambled up and ran for the outer door.

He had no way to know whether that frightened man would bear his message as he had asked. He had no time to wait. He sent Owl out the opened door, out and around to the high walls of the Guelesfort, to a place midway in the west wing of the palace.

There, there, Efanor slept, closely guarded. It was an easy passage in the gray place, knowing exactly where Efanor was.

And Efanor, unlike his brother, had some slight presence in the gray: his dreams were very much within reach.

—Prince Efanor, he said. Come to the Quinaltine. Don’t delay for anything. Have your servants bring your clothes.

Efanor leapt into bright awareness, within a gray space he had only skimmed in his meditations.

—Tristen? Is it Tristen? Gods save us!

—Come quickly. I’ll not tell you until we meet face-to-face. Come to the Quinaltine.

Efanor doubted his own reason. Fear and denial colored his presence: good Quinalt that he was, the gray space should not be open to him, or so he believed, and strove halfheartedly to deny his own senses.

But Tristen drew out the little book of devotions Efanor had given him.

—Know me by this. Come. Believe me. And hurry.

Efanor believed. Confidence flared. Hope did, and curiosity, and Tristen left the gray space quickly, aware of the hovering Shadows, old Shadows and new ones, hateful and hating. It was no good place to linger, not for the space of a breath. But he knew now that Efanor would come.

Another priest had arrived, and ran back. Then a third, and a fourth, and all fled.

Shadows prowled the confused Lines meanwhile and tested the strength of them, pressing at the tangle in the wards: Tristen felt their fear and their desperation, and saw the wound in the Lines they made.

He drew his sword and with it traced a Line of his own on the stones, slowly, surely, drawing the Line with the touch of the metal on stone, securing it with the touch of his boots on the floor and the strength of his wishes in the stones.

Past this Shadows should not come. This was what they should agree on, this was what they should guard, one Line, one defense. He wished it so, and the ward flared behind him.

The Shadows just at arm’s length writhed and seethed, imprisoned in the tangle of Lines that had been, and now so great a panicked number of them pressed against those old wards that one failed at last, as it might have failed under the enemy’s assault. The breach let forth a great rush of them.

But they came up instead against the new Line, a moiling confusion that set his teeth on edge. They brought death, and cold, and anger, but his Line held.

He chose the broken Line and dispelled it, freeing more reticent spirits, as easy as a pass of his hand and a wish. He dispelled one misdrawn Line after another, until long-pent Shadows, rushing forward to freedom, found his Line, and knew their boundary, and found a straight path along it. They flowed along that perimeter, and rushed back and forth, back and forth, no few violently trying its strength. But without the crossed lines channeling their anger, those attacks came at random, in isolated areas along the line, and posed little threat. Some, finding order in their movement, sang to him, and made the Lines sing, the music of stone, the music of the Masons’ making.

Still he brandished the sword up and around until the blue fire of the ward flared along the walls, and up among the rafters, along the threatened roof and down again, past statues in their niches and down again to completion against the pavings.

And those Shadows older than Men, those filled with the greatest anger and contempt, cowered back from that fire, knowing well its potency, and listening to the music.

One Shadow, one of the newest disturbances and blind to magic, challenged the barrier, and battered aside the weaker Shadows, and attempted harm; but it, too, could not break forth… a Shadow that held something vaguely of Cefwyn and of Efanor, a strong presence, full of powerful emotions.

Yet it was fear, not anger, that drove it to challenge the barrier.

It feared and fled something deeper and darker, something barriered in older Lines, far back across the floor that now was, that knew nothing of the music—but this Shadow, that had been a warrior and a soldier, and a king, knew the danger there, and tried to rally the others.

There was the real danger in this place. The tangle of Lines he had resolved, and freed the trapped spirits to an easier flow. But there was a reason, deep within, that the tormented Shadows had so persisted at the barrier, a deeper dark where something moved, or many things moved, like so many dark serpents, shapeless and powerful, and unwilling to be confined.

The collective presence in that depth, behind wards grown old and weak, had the coldness and the power of the stone faces, as adamant and as terrible, and what dwelt there was neither resigned to its prison, nor completely contained by the Lines that great Masons had drawn, even before later, lesser, masons had compromised those Lines.

Now, those ancient Lines far back, blue and red, grew weak and sickly at the points of its attacks, and the music faltered.

It did not augur well if that welter of dark breached the ancient barrier and assailed the new Line—if the Shadows of that darkness, full of malice, gained power such as the Shadows had at Althalen. Armed men had fallen under the assault of the haunts at Althalen, finding no substance their swords might strike and no protection in their armor or their skill. Only Auld Syes moderated the anger of those spirits, and ruled them.

But she was not here. Only this one Shadow of a soldier. Such was the threat in that depth: all the spirits that Men feared fled it. It was not Sihhë, nor even of Ynefel’s age… it was older, older, and echoed of his fears in Ynefel’s loft, or that night on the stairs, when all Ynefel had creaked and tottered.

And this danger lay in the heart of a sleeping town, at the heart of Cefwyn’s kingdom. What precisely it was did not Unfold to him, but he knew it recognized him—he knew it wished him harm, but that thus far it could not press past the protections of his magic.

It hated him as it wished destruction of all that Men had built; and it hated him because he stood with Men, and wished them and their doings well.

It hated him as it had hated him at Ynefel and whispered outside his window.

It hated him as it had striven through Hasufin, but it was not

Hasufin: it had possessed Hasufin, and diverted him from Mauryl’s hands.

It hated him because it knew its destroyer had come. And having failed in direct assault, it sought a weakness, any weakness, or an ally that might serve it for an instant—as Hasufin had served, and served more than once.

Here was a battle to fight, within these walls, within the mews. He had a chance here. It was willing to face him here.

But if he failed to be at Ilefínian, Cefwyn would surely die. If he failed to be at Ilefínian Hasufin would prevail.

A sound disturbed him. He hurtled back to the world of Men, and the outer Lines, and stood by the altar rail, his hands and feet like ice.

Efanor had indeed come as quickly as he had asked, barefoot and wrapped in a sheet, and attended by two of the frightened priests.

“This place is in danger,” Tristen said. “I need your help, Your Highness.”

“What danger? From the enemy?”

He drew a breath, for there was so much to tell: “The Lord Commander brought Her Grace to Amefel. She’s in Henas’amef, with Emuin; Idrys is going back to Cefwyn, in the north. All the south is crossing the river, coming north to Ilefínian, and Cefwyn is coming from the east… but so is Ryssand. Ryssand means to kill him. But worse, there’s someone who’s stopped the messengers reaching me, someone close to Cefwyn.”

“A traitor!”

“Idrys doesn’t know who. But he’s going back as fast as he can, and I’m going north, to deal with Tasmôrden.” Owl swept down from some height among the rafters and he unthinkingly lifted his gloved hand to receive Owl’s taloned feet. “We can deal with all that. Hasufin is in this. He tried to take Tarien’s baby, but we stopped him. Now he’s helping Tasmôrden, who’s helping Ryssand, and if Cefwyn defeats them, this place offers Hasufin a chance to break through.”

“The Quinaltine? This is holy ground!”

“Henas’amef has a place, a doorway that opens sometimes to a wish from outside. So does Althalen: the Lord Regent wards it, and so does Auld Syes, and I know nothing gets through there. Ilefínian has such a place; so does Ynefel; and this is one, an old place, I think, old as Galasien. Cefwyn says your grandfather is here… whoever it is, I think all the Shadows here fear what lies beneath this floor.”

“Grandfather?” Efanor glanced wide-eyed at the shadows beyond the candles. “Grandfather never ran from anything.”

“The wards were never right here. The Masons who raised this building made a mistake and I’ve set a new Line, but this is still where Hasufin may try to come.” He dared no more detailed explanation: he saw the unease on Efanor’s face. “I have to go to Cefwyn, to help him. Will you guard it?”

“Gods witness I’ll guard it!” Efanor declared. “—But how do I do that?”

“You have the gift.”

“Oh, no, not I!”

“It waked you from sleep, Your Highness. And you and the priests, gifted or not, must walk this Line, and wish it may hold, wish it with all your hearts and minds. Pray for it! Wish it strong. Let no Shadow break out here, not a single one, or the Line will break and terrible things will come. I’ve set the new Line on the pavings. Do you see?”

He marked it with his sword, and Efanor came, barefoot as he was, and looked along it, left and right, resolution and wariness in the lines of his face.

“It glows,” Efanor said faintly, as if it were a fault to be mended, instead of an indication of its strength and health. “It glows.”

“It must! Keep it glowing! Walk here, Your Highness. Walk this Line continually, and wish it strong, against all the ill it holds back.” He sought for some reassurance to give Efanor that would keep Efanor’s wits about him and remind him, come what might, of his sole, single-minded duty: and he found it in the little book he had brought, his proof to Efanor who he was, and that they still were friends. He gave Efanor his own gift back again and pressed his fingers about the beautiful little book, even as Owl fluttered up about his shoulders, urging him to leave. “Think on the good, never harm! Think only on the good, and on us living, and your brother being well, and walk the Line and wish it strong. Do you still see it?”

“I see it,” Efanor breathed, looking along it.

“Do that for me,” Tristen said, “and for your brother.” He was sure now that he had made himself understood. He had faith in Efanor, as in no one else in the Quinaltine, and knew Efanor could command the priests as no other in the court could do. And now he felt the place beginning to fade about him. “Pray, Your Highness!” That was the magic Efanor knew how to work, and it would have to serve. “Pray and bless the place and think only of good and life! Walk the Line, and make it strong!”

The gray wind whirled about him again, cold this time, and violent. Sounds howled past him, and the gray place darkened around him as Owl flew ahead of him.

Then even Owl seemed uncertain, and took a new direction, and then a third.

Angry Shadows loomed up, old Shadows, those older than Men and resentful of those usurpers, and these Shadows seemed to track him with mindful attention. The dark was their weapon, and they wielded it with a lash of wind to make it more bitter and more biting. They wished to sweep him back again and, by defeating him, to breach the Line he had made, but it was no longer his fight, that within the Quinaltine, where Quinaltine prayers went up. The soft tread of feet along the Line resounded among these Shadows like a single repeated chord, over and over, the same thing, endlessly the same thing—yet he could not tell from what quarter. He had lost his way for a heartbeat, he had lost Owl—then thought he saw a light.

He turned that way, then stopped and lost ground, belatedly aware of yet another hostile Shadow, a threat that prowled that region ahead, not behind.

He dared not even think, here. He dared not move. The enemy came as the Wind, both wary and angry, and the Wind blew and whispered to him.

—Ah, well, here you are.

He turned away from that Voice. He refused to be afraid, refused to run, but he would not deal with it, either, not now, not yet.

—Mauryl’s mistake walks on two feet. Mauryl’s undoing… all his efforts wasted in you.

It could not tempt him to argument. He was concerned only with the way out, and he searched for it.

But the Wind came near him, tugged at his cloak and his hair.

—I banished Mauryl as he banished the lords of Galasien. Was that not justice?

Questions. He would not answer, would not look, but his heart seemed apt to burst. He ran the loft stairs, he hid in the dark, and the Wind came and scattered his birds.

—Banished him, and I shall banish you. Make your wards. Seal your gates. I know the way to your heart, Barrakketh. I know your name and you know mine. Say it. Say it, and summon me. Do you dare face me?

—Nothing at your word, Tristen said, and caught after a thickness in the air of the gray space. It was Owl, who settled to his hand, and fought, rowing with his wings, for purchase there against the gale. Nothing ever at your order.

—Ah! Can you name me? So short a step! Declare my name, and let us deal together—let us bargain, you and I.

—I have nothing to do with you.

—Nothing? Not even hate? There is a darkness in you, there is an anger and I know the key to unlock it. I know what lies beneath the wards in that place as I know what lies behind the gates of your anger, Sihhë-lord!

—Leave me! Leave this place!

—Ah, but do you rule here? Threaten as you will, Shadow of Barrakketh, the hour will come… your hour, and mine.

—Not this day.

—I know a secret. Do you wish to know? Does curiosity move you? Ask. Ask the question.

Curiosity was his besetting weakness, and his prevailing strength. Curiosity had led him to good and to had and guided him through the dark.

But this question was no question. It led him to harm: he was sure of it.

Yet curiosity drew his gaze, even knowing better, and in the heart of the Wind he saw plains made desolate and homes laid waste… he saw battlefields and armies striving on them in the sunset, and above all the banner, the Tower and the Star.

So he stood bespelled for the space of a heartbeat, and felt the desolation of that sight creeping into his soul. This, this was his work, and the Wind beat his back like the buffet of vast wings. Owl fought to stay with him, but began to lose his footing: a presence clawed at Owl from the other side, a Shadow hating and hateful, resentful for her lost life.

But subtle as a sunrise, a presence crept up on him, a presence stealthy and persistent and suddenly headlong, an attack against the Wind.

It had opposed the Wind before, that presence. Something of Mauryl was in the heart of it, and something of Cefwyn, and something of Efanor and even of himself—old teacher, old master of unwilling students, old man curbing young mischief and directing eyes always to the sunrise, not the sunset.

—Tristen! he heard Emuin call. Young fool! Come back here!

He trusted and he went, while the Wind roared and rushed and buffeted his back.

He went, and sometimes Owl winged before him and sometimes behind, but he persevered… homeward. He was sure now of that word. Home.

And the gray grew lighter before him as he saw two, no, three and four and five and six faint shadows within a pearl gray dawn.

He walked onto solid stone, his hair stirred by the beat of spectral wings. About him was a corridor of gray brightening to a clear blue light, and in those beckoning hands knew Emuin’s touch, and Ninévrisë’s… even Tarien’s, frightened and protective as a mother hawk above Elfwyn’s sleepy awareness: she was there. There, too, was Paisi, the mouse in the woodwork, skittish and yet purposeful, and brazenly brave for his size.

It was Paisi who all but shouted for his attention now, and ran forward, to his own peril.

—Fool! Emuin cried.

But in that same instant another dared more than that, and forged ahead into the burning blue. Crissand came, never mind his orders and a wizard’s will: Crissand had come, with a devotion like Uwen’s, as determined, and as brave. Owl flew as far as Crissand’s hand, that far, and hovered, and then flew past, out into the world of Men.

Crissand reached him just as Owl vanished from his sight… reaching out to take his hand and pull him home.

—My lord, Crissand called him, king though Crissand would yet be. They locked hands and then embraced, and all the Lines of Hen Amas rose up bright and strong around them. Emuin and Ninévrisë and Paisi hovered mothlike above the fire of the mews, and Tarien, too, with Cefwyn’s wizard child—they all were around him; and in their collective will, and a wall went up against the Wind, making firm the wards.

Tristen let go his defense then, and trusted Crissand to pull him safely into the world of Men, and there to hold him in his arms, steadying him on feet that had lost all feeling.

He was cold: it had been very cold where he had walked last, a cold almost to chill the soul, but Crissand warmed his fingers to life, and Emuin reached his heart with a steady, sure light, driving the last vestiges of the dark from him, lighting all the recesses where his deepest fears had taken hold.

“Frost,” Crissand said, and indeed a rime of frost stood on his black armor. Tristen found his fingers were white and chill as ice. So he felt a stiffness about his hair, and brushed the rime from his left arm, finding cause then to laugh, a sheer joy in life.

“A cold, empty Wind,” he said to Crissand, and then cried: “Did I not say wait with Emuin?”

“I was with Emuin,” Crissand said. “Didn’t you say in that place there’s no being parted? I never left him… or you, my lord! Paisi and Her Grace of Elwynor never left us. Even Tarien. Even she.”

And the babe, Cefwyn’s son, her son, her fledgling she would not see harmed: Hasufin had bid for a life and now Tarien herself was his implacable enemy, the surest warder against her twin’s malice. He knew that as surely as he still carried an awareness within him of the gray place: Orien Aswydd might have tried to drive him aside and make him lose his way, but Orien no longer had the advantage of the living.

Above all else Orien would not lay covetous hands on her sister’s child, not while he was in his mother’s arms. Tarien rested now, weary from her venture, still seething with the fight she had fought along the wards. She had become like Owl, very much like Owl, merciless in her cause, possessed of a claimant and a Place and let at liberty.

“Never trust Tarien too much,” Tristen said on a breath, for he saw danger in that direction; but the danger where he had been was sufficient. “Did Owl come past?”

“Like a thunderbolt,” Crissand said, aiding him to walk: Tristen found his feet had grown numb, as if he had walked for hours in deep snow. “He went somewhere in the hall. I don’t know where.”

“He’ll come back,” Tristen said, with no doubt at all, and no doubt what he had now to do. “Is it dawn?”

“Close on it,” Crissand said. “All’s ready. But rest a while, my lord. Warm yourself.”

“We’ll ride north,” Tristen said. “North now.”

“My lord, never till master Emuin says you’re fit.” Lusin had come to lend a hand with him, and supported him on the other side in what was now the downstairs hall, alight with candles and teeming with fearful servants. Paisi was there, and stood on one foot and the other, bearing a message from Emuin, Tristen was sure.

Paisi pressed something like a coin into his gloved hand. “Master Emuin says carry this and ride tonight.”

“He’s not fit!” Crissand protested, but Emuin’s charge was all Tristen needed to reinforce his own sense of urgency.

“I’ll be well when the sun touches me,” he said, and took his weight to himself, unsteady as he was. “And Uwen expects me. I know him. He’ll ride back, never mind my orders to wait at the river. He’ll ride all the way back to town if I don’t meet him.” He found his stride and gathered his wind, seeing the stable-court stairs. “Is Dys saddled?”

“ ‘E will be,” Paisi said, and sped ahead of him, small herald of a desperate, wizardous purpose.

“My lord,” Crissand argued with him still.

“They’ll kill Cefwyn,” Tristen said to all the company around him. “If he falls, Ylesuin won’t see the summer and Amefel itself won’t stand.” It was clearer to him than anything near at hand: all of that was in flux, but the great currents had their directions, clear to anyone who could dip in and drink—and did not Hasufin know these things?

Surely Hasufin knew, Hasufin who was older than he and canny and difficult to trap: he could no longer be sure of Hasufin in any particular, but what he could do, he had to guess that Hasufin could do as well—shadow and substance, they mirrored one another, and Hasufin tried to make that mirroring perfect, and tried to name him his name, and tried to make him all that Hasufin remembered him to be.

Foresight had advantages, he said to himself as he essayed the west stairs, above Orien’s walled-up tomb. Foresight was a great advantage, but expecting everything to be as it had been… that was the trap, the disadvantage, in Hasufin’s centuries of knowledge.

“Mauryl Summoned me,” he said to those on either hand, “but it went amiss. Or did it? Was his wizardry not greater than his working? And didn’t things go as he wished, in spite of his wishes?”

“I don’t know these things, my lord,” Crissand said, at his right hand, and Lusin, at his left. “Nor meself, m’lord. And ye ain’t in any case to be ridin’.”

“I can. I will.” They were in the open air, now, and he knew Emuin had heard what he had surmised.

—As he wished, in spite of his wishes… all of that, you are, young lord. You’re the substance of his wishes, and the sum of his courage. He let you free. He didn’t Shape you. He left that to the world and this age. He left you to Shape yourself, young lord, and Tristen he named you, and Tristen you are. Think of it. Think of it, where you go. Never let that go.

“M’lord’s horse!” Syllan called out, and Lusin shouted: “Rouse and rise, there! Rouse out! Horses!”

Haman’s lads appeared out of nowhere, and hard on that, Lusin sent a man to the barracks, and another to the gate-guards, and ordered the bell rung that would rouse all the troops.

Arm and out! the bell seemed to say, and within moments men appeared from the barracks, and horses were led out under saddle. Crissand’s men reached the gates, and a boy brought the three standards, the black ones of Ynefel and Althalen, and the blood red standard of Amefel, in a light that began to supplant the light of the torches.

Arm and out! Arm and out! came from the bells, and Crissand’s captain rode a thick-legged gray into the half-light of the yard, carrying a furled dark standard to the steps where they stood.

Crissand came to the edge of the steps and took it in his hand, looking up.

“My lord! This one, for the lord of Althalen and Ynefel! This one, with the others!”

“Unfurl it,” he said, knowing which standard it was, and in the wind that began with dawn Crissand unfurled the Star and Crown of the Sihhë Kings, the banner Tasmôrden had tried to claim, and now would see carried against him.

One more Tawwys brought and saw spread against the wind, the Tower and Checker of the Lady Regent, until the standards that should go before a great army flew and cracked on the wind. She was with him, as she had helped draw him out of the gray space: she sat now by her fireside, wrapped in her own efforts, which were for the wards of the fortress, and for the watch Efanor had undertaken. With Emuin’s sure aid she settled herself to watch all the accesses of the place, and nothing might pursue its occupants here, nothing might pass her awareness. She was the Tower, and she prepared to stand siege.

Paisi appeared at the top of the steps, smallish and wide-eyed, and scampering down the steps to the alarm of the horses.

“Careful there,” Lusin chided him, and set a heavy hand on Paisi’s shoulder, staying him short of the last dive in among the milling horses.

“Master wishes ye know he’s watchin’!” Paisi shouted out. “An’ bids ye sleep o’ nights!”

Tristen waved at him, understanding, but coming no closer, for the men afoot and the horses being brought filled the smallish yard, and those of them that were mounted had to move to give the others room enough. His guard had mounted up, staying close with him, and new men, all of Meiden, carried the standards.

Dys and Cass would join them outside the walls, among the remounts, and Uwen was off on Liss. It was only Gery that awaited them here, and Tristen mounted up and took up his shield from Aran’s hands, the red one, with Amefel’s black Eagle. But he did not ride alone: Crissand joined him, on a thick-legged, sturdy gray, while his house guard under his captain waited just outside the Zeide gate, where there was room.

“Let us go,” Tristen said, and Gweyl, in Uwen’s place until they had regained him and Gedd, relayed the order to send the banner-bearers out before them.

They rode out under the menace of the gate into the chill, clear dawn, out into the town. The bell tolled above them, signal to all the town, and it waked every sleeper and brought shutters open and shadowy bundled figures to the streets.

Lord Sihhë! the people shouted, gathering everywhere along the main street of the town, some wrapped in blankets, straight from their beds and into the chill that frosted breath. All the way to the lower gates the townsfolk stood and shouted out, Lord Sihhë and Meiden!

So they shouted out for the other lords of Amefel as they, too, turned out with their house guards, joining them from side streets, and so a handful of enterprising boys shouted from the top of the town’s main gate as they rode out, a last salute of high, boyish voices: The High King! The High King!

So they had shouted. Was it now or then? The High King and the king of Hen Amas!

The banner then seemed green, Aswydd green, and the dragons reared in defiance and threat as they had loomed above him in the hall.

“Lord Sihhë! Lord Sihhë! Lord Sihhë for Amefel and Meiden!”

So the shouts faded, and, beyond the town gate, they turned first on the west road past the stables. They rode over the traces of other riders, past emptied camps. They were not the first, but the last of the army to ride out.

But with them came the signal for all the lords to move, to force war on Tasmôrden from the south—and to save the king.

CHAPTER 7

The army of Amefel moved at the brisk pace of the horses, so that they had progressed well out from Henas’amef before the sun rose above the hills—while signal fires lit on those hills advised all the outlying lands they were called to arms and must converge on the riverside by country trails and back roads and whatever served.

The whole land was now in movement. All the baggage that might have delayed them, even the equipage of the heavy horses, with the tents, all of that had gone to the river, the last of it following Cevulirn’s passage, they needed no shelter with Modeyneth’s hospitality halfway, and that left the Amefin nothing to do but make speed.

And sure enough, as the sun stood at noon, two riders appeared out of the distance and the folding of the hills.

Tristen had no doubt who it was. He knew Uwen by his riding and Gedd by his company. They came up on one another with all deliberate speed, and as they met, Uwen swung in close with him and Crissand.

“The Lord Commander’s on ‘is way,” Uwen said first, “an’ sent us back before he got to the river, but we told ‘im all what he was set to hear, an’ we come back fast as fast.”

“The fires are lit,” Tristen said. “I’ve taken precautions and left Emuin and Her Grace in charge, with Lusin. The Amefin that will march are marching.”

“No delays as I can see, m’lord. I rode as far as Modeyneth. Lord Drusenan’s gone to the wall, and roused out a good lot of archers to riverside, as ain’t been needed yet, thank the gods, nor will be, if Lord Cevulirn’s across.”

“Good news,” Tristen said, for Drusenan had promised archers, and if Cefwyn pressed too hard and fast from the east or if the enemy came south from the beginning without that encouragement, then archers on the southern bridges might serve them well.

But wizardry had now a third place to attack, and that was Idrys, riding hard toward the river… while Cefwyn, blind and deaf to magic, knew to watch Ryssand but not men closer to him. Still, the advantages wizardry had in Cefwyn’s direction were all too attractive—for it was to protect Cefwyn that Tristen found himself constrained to take actions he would not of his own will take, when his heart told him to cast everything to the winds and follow Idrys to Cefwyn’s camp.

He could not go as fast as his thoughts could fly: if magic alone would serve, he could have gone to Ilefínian before dawn, and stood face-to-face with Tasmôrden and the enemy. He could, he was sure, go aside now to the ruins of Althalen and have a way from there. Oh, there were ways and ways to reach Ilefínian, but only one to reach it with an army; and as much confidence as he had in his own strength, it was not enough to fling himself alone into the heart of his enemy’s power: the temptation was there, the urge was there, but he trusted neither, fearing traps, not yet seeing enough into Ilefínian to know what he might face.

So he kept his pace at Uwen’s side and at Crissand’s, and they whiled away the time as they rode with Uwen’s account and Uwen’s questions, what had they done, who was in authority in Henas’amef and what time they hoped to make. Idrys had questioned Uwen and Gedd very closely, elicited every detail from Gedd, where he had lodged in town, when he had moved, when he had known men were following him and what he had done.

“Yet he gave no names,” Crissand asked. “He gave no indication who it might be that he fears.”

“Not a one,” Uwen said. “Naught that we can do, ‘cept by wish-in’, which m’lord does, I’m sure.”

“That I do,” Tristen said fervently, “and wish him speed.”

“Speed to us, too,” Uwen said, and, turning in his saddle to glance back at the Amefin troop he had driven uphill and down, until men and horses alike had grown used to hard moving. “Ho, ye men, not so sore as ye’d ha’ been wi’out ye rid through them hills, is’t?”

“No, sir,” the answer came back with many voices. “No, Captain, sir.”

“Ain’t sorry now.”

“No, sir. No, Captain, sir.”

“‘At’s the good word, an’ gods bless!”

“Gods bless, sir!”

Tristen found himself moved to laughter despite the troubles of the night. So was Crissand. The sun was up, and the banners flew no matter the difficulty of flying them in the steady wind, for there were men on the move and on guard all across the land. To a man, they wore the red badges of Amefel, having no wish to run afoul of their own watchers in the hills.

And true enough, it was not so very long after that a copse of woods gave up two shadowy watchers who stepped out into the road.

“Lanfarnessemen,” Crissand guessed, and Tristen was sure of it. The two went in forest colors and gray cloaks, and might as easily fade into the trees where they stood.

He was glad to see them, however, and drew rein where the rangers waited.

“Lord Tristen,” the foremost said with all respect, and indeed, it was a man he had seen with Pelumer, once upon a time. “The El-wynim have moved from Althalen, all but a handful, who’ve raised an archer-tower there. The most have gone toward Modeyneth and toward the river.”

Aeself had followed his orders. Auld Syes had culled her flock, he was sure, no less than the frozen bodies in the snow, but having Aeself’s men out early and ranging into the rough lands gave him some trepidation… not least for Idrys, whose presence within their lines he had not anticipated. He hoped Idrys had gone as he planned, to the river, to Sovrag: but Idrys was a man apt to change his plans on the instant and do things no one foresaw… to his hazard, in a province ready to defend itself against Tasmôrden’s men.

“The Lord Commander of Ylesuin is on the roads,” Tristen said to the two Lanfarnessemen, “and he may take any sort of clothing and go by himself. No one should harm him.”

“A number of men with the red cloth rode out on this road and two rode back to you,” the silent man said. “There was a dark man of rank, who stayed with the main body, and where they went is under others’ watch. We’ll pass that word as quickly as we can.”

“Nothin’ faster ‘n the Lord Commander’s apt to move,” Uwen said under his breath.

“Do what you can,” Tristen said to the rangers, who retreated back into the woods, a trickery of the eye the moment they were within the underbrush.

“Gods send he don’t run into Aeself,” Uwen said. “We told him about the red bands, and I saw to it he were wearin’ one. Whether he’ll keep it…”

That the signal they had agreed on, Amefin colors, a costly dye, none an intruder could find so easily in his pack or a piece of a common blanket: either cloak or coat, pennon or a scrap of cloth about the helm. It was Pelumer’s canny notion, and even his rangers, colorless against the land, wore that one bright badge, scraps of red they showed about the wrist, no more, for Pelumer’s men counted on going unseen.

“I shan’t wish,” Tristen said, fearful of intruding on Idrys’ choices, whatever they were: he knew how stealthily the Lord Commander moved in the court and in the field, and there was a real chance that Idrys might at any moment change his mind and his direction and his apparent allegiance, either because the boats might not be where they hoped or because Idrys simply rode the currents of his own unmagical wizardry, and chose not even to have friends and allies know what he would do next. The one thing certain about him was that he was Cefwyn’s man, and answered only to Cefwyn.

And on that resolution not to intervene Tristen set the company moving at the same steady pace, as much as they could prudently ask of the horses and still keep them fit for days of effort afterward.

If he wished anything, it was that Cevulirn might have the bridge open and a secure footing on the other side of the river, but that was as much as he wanted, and he wanted that very quietly, with the least possible disturbance of the gray space, emulating, as he could, master Emuin, who could go unseen there.

He had learned from master Emuin, how to be curious without wishing any particular outcome, and thereby how to go more quietly in that place. He had learned by comparison to Emuin how very great a disturbance he could make.

More, he realized now, from Crissand and Efanor and others with the gift unrealized, but who touched the gray space with their innocent wishes, that, even before he knew that the gray space existed, before Emuin had shown it to him, he had been a troubling influence within it, boisterous and self-willed and obstinate.

So he must have been to Mauryl as well.

And had Mauryl not shown him the gray place because Mauryl feared his ignorance would lead him into danger? Or might access to that place have made him a danger, to himself, to Mauryl, to all around him?

Certainly he would have learned that others existed, and learned how to reach for them, before he had learned restraint.

By all he knew, Emuin had taken him in hand out of utter desperation… had shown him the gray place in great trepidation, marveling only that he had never found it for himself—and then Emuin had immediately retreated to the peace of Anwyfar, distant enough in Guelessar to watch him unseen. Baffling and painful as Emuin’s desertion had seemed to him at the time, now he understood how Emuin’s close presence would have tempted him into more and more dangerous exploration. The world of Men had been his distraction, discovery after discovery unsettling his understanding, leading him by small degrees, not great ones, and keeping him always uncertain of his balance.

Flesh as well as spirit.

The world of spirit had always been easier for him to explore— easier, but infinitely more dangerous and less confined. Watch his feet, Mauryl had tried to teach him. Learn caution in a realm where the rules were simple, where if one stepped off the cliff edge, one fell to a predictable death—

Caution had been Emuin’s wish and Emuin’s hope for him… when he set free one who might know no bounds.

Win his friendship, Emuin had said to Cefwyn, regarding him, and on this ride it came to him what two things Emuin had wished to do in giving Cefwyn that advice: first to disarm him of the danger he posed to Cefwyn, to set any random wishes he might make to Cefwyn’s good, not his ill; and secondly, to distract him with the questions of Cefwyn’s material world and keep him occupied with that, out of the gray space.

The gray space might have been quieter before he came. It was certainly more silent in those days when Emuin had been at Anwyfar: the Aswydds had surely been aware of him and cannily held themselves remote.

Remote as Hasufin, too, had kept himself remote: Hasufin had shown no desire, past that first encounter at Lewenbrook, to come at close quarters with him.

Wizards of all different sorts had kept their distance, wary of his ignorance, wary of his disposition, wary of his power, but mostly, he believed now, wary of his lack of wizardry… not his lack of power, but his lack of the most basic rules wizards knew.

Wizards depended on those rules to work their magic; he did not.

Wizards planned all they did according to those rules.

He had none. He learned the art only to know what his friends and his enemies might do, or expect. But at the last, he did not find it of use.

In the world of Men, he traveled now to be where Cefwyn appointed him to be, assured that that was the one rule it was wise to follow, but constrained by the rules of the realm of Men as he was not constrained in the gray realm. His options were limited: Tasmôr-den could anticipate his moves and guard against them, using the constraints of the land.

But that wizards could not similarly predict his options had made his greater enemy lie quiet, waiting, perhaps, for him to reveal his limitations… or his intentions.

More unsettling to their wishing ways, they could not wish him to move in certain ways.

Mauryl had indeed despaired of him; Emuin had dealt with him only at safe distance; Hasufin had attempted to use Aséyneddin and his entire army, but then abandoned that hope, and still lost. Hasufin had hoped again in Tarien’s child; but Tarien had come home to him to bear Cefwyn’s son, come to return the Aswydds to their Place in the world. As good fling a stone into the sky: down it would come. Back the Aswyddim had come, even to perish and join the Shadows in the Zeide’s stones, and the whole world sighed with the release of a condition that could not have persisted, the separation of the Aswydds from Hen Amas… were there not other needs that strained at the fabric of the world, and was not one Crissand, riding with him? And was not one Orien, within her tomb?

And was not one another wizard, born in Amefel?

He had advised Cefwyn to cast the Aswydds out; and so it had served, for the hour of Hasufin’s assault at Lewen field, but only for that hour. After Lewenbrook, it was possible Hasufin had wanted them apart from him, as much as he wanted them away from Henas’amef—until Hasufin had taken Cefwyn’s son… but the Place itself had its conditions, stronger, it appeared, than those of Hasufin or himself, and by one means and another, the stone fell to earth, water ran downhill, birds came to their nest, and the Aswydds came back to their hall.

He, however, had no such Place, at least, that he had yet discovered: he only had persons. He had Crissand; he had Cefwyn; he had Ninévrisë of Elwynor and now Cefwyn’s two sons.

But he himself felt no inclination to rush to earth. He found no downhill course. He had no direction, other than the needs of those he loved.

Was he himself a hill down which those who knew him, who trusted him, must flow?

And was that the danger inherent in him? That when stones did fall, when water did run downhill, they might wreak havoc in the world?

He was not like Crissand, not like Cefwyn, nor Ninévrisë, nor like Mauryl nor yet like Emuin, and he was not like Uwen, or Idrys. Nothing like him existed or had existed—not even his enemy.

The Lanfarnessemen had not remarked on the banner among the other banners: it was not their place to remark on it, but surely they knew what it signified, and perhaps even knew how they had come by it—Pelumer’s men, though camping to themselves in scattered bands, had uncommonly thorough knowledge of what had happened in Henas’amef and elsewhere.

Without doubt, they knew why it flew.

Tasmôrden would know.

How northern men would see it he could well guess.

Prudence would have bidden Crissand furl it, or better yet, not to bring it at all; but it would go. Like the Aswydds returning to Henas’amef, that banner would go with him—it belonged to him. Cefwyn had known, had given him the arms, less the crown, even when he himself failed to know it was, should be, must be—his.

It was not a territory of land that banner claimed; but the rights of the land; it was not a town or a capital it represented, but a Place. A Place for him to exist… a Place that was himself.

He was as he was, in a year which had turned to a new Year, in a land wherein spring much resembled autumn, brown grass, bare trees, a welter of mud, hillside springs gushing full into gullies and turning any low spot to bog.

He had come full circle, but everything was changed. And he was changed. Owl, that mysterious haunt of last year, flitted sometimes in view and came and went in the patchy trees… guiding him, confirming him in his choices, no longer ambiguous, but no prophet, either, of the outcome.

And for very long they went, he and Crissand and Uwen, in the silence of men who had exhausted every thought but the purpose for which they went: sharing that, they had no need for words, only the solidity of each other’s company, from the ranks forward. They discussed the condition of gear, the change about of horses, the disposition of a water flask, those things that regarded where things were and how they were, but not where they were going or what might happen there: the one they knew and the other no one could speculate.

It was toward late afternoon when they reached Modeyneth and when they saw the traces of many men in the muddy fields, and the safety of the houses as assured as before, they were glad of the sight, and men began to talk hopefully of a cup of something before they moved on.

Drusenan’s wife came out to meet them before they had even reached the hall, treading carefully on a walkway of straw that crossed the hoof-churned mud. Her skirts were muddy about the hems: it was not her first such crossing of that yard; and she came with her sleeves girt up and an apron about her, and it well floured and spattered and stained.

“Lord,” she said, “welcome! Will you stay the night?”

“We’ll press on,” Tristen said, “but an hour to rest the horses, that we can spare, and food for us if you have it.”

“Stew and porridge, m’lord, as best as we have, but the pots is most always aboil and nobody knowing when the men’s comin’ in, we just throw more in, the more as comes to eat it. And there’s bread, there’s always bread.”

That brought a cheer from the front rank to the rearmost, and they were as glad to be down from the saddle as they were of the thick, simple fare in the rush-floored hall, with the dogs vying for attention and the women hurrying about with bowls and bread.

Bows leaned against the wall, near the fire, near the cooking tables, near the door, with quivers of arrows, all the same, all ready, and no man’s hand near them: it was the women’s defense, if ever the war spilled across the river and beyond the wall.

He was determined it would not.

They sat with Drusenan’s lady, for a moment paused in her work, and heard a brisk, fair account of every company that had passed, its numbers, its condition, and the time the women had wished them on their way.

“A tall, dark man, among the rest,” Tristen said, for that aspect of the Lord Commander there was no hiding.

“That one, yes,” the lady said, “and no lingering. Took a pack of bread and cheese and filled their water flasks, and on they went, being in some great hurry… we didn’t mistake ‘em, did we? Your Grace isn’t after ‘em.”

“Honest men,” Tristen said, “without any question, on honest business.”

“It’s comin’, is it?”

“It won’t come here,” Tristen said. “Not if we can prevent it, and if the wall can.”

“Gods save us,” the good woman said, and was afraid, it was no difficulty to know it… afraid not so much for this place, but for Drusenan and the rest. “Gods save Amefel.”

“Gods save us all,” Uwen echoed her.

“And you and yours,” Crissand said quietly.

“We should move,” Tristen said, for by her account Idrys’ band was early on its way and Cevulirn would have his request to cross and camp. “They won’t linger and we shouldn’t.”

There was not a man of them but would have wished to linger the rest of the hour, but it was down with the remnant left in bowls, and here and there a piece of bread tucked into a jacket, a half cup of ale downed in a gulp, against a hard ride to come, and no sleep but a nap along the way.

Drusenan’s lady brought them outside into the dark, she and all the women and the girls, some of them down from the guard post, with their bows. The women saw them onto their horses, with only the light from the open door.

It was muddy going, for the dark and all, and now they had the banners put away and their cloaks close about them. The horses were reluctant, having been given the prospect of a warm stable and that now taken from them: Dys was surly for half an hour, and Cass farther than that, while Crissand’s horse and the guards’ were entirely out of their high spirits and the horses at lead, those who had carried them all day, plodded.

“Now’s the time we look sharp around us,” Uwen said to the guards, “on account of if any man’s movin’ we’re the noisiest.”

“The Lord Commander will have told them we’re coming,” Crissand said, meaning the guard at the wall.

“Beyond any doubt,” Tristen said, and now in the dark he did resort ever so gingerly to the gray space, listening to the land around them. He heard a hare in a thicket, a fox on its nightbound hunt, both aware of the passage of horses on the road.

And Owl was back, with a sudden swoop out of the dark that startled the foremost horses out of their sulking.

“Damn,” said Crissand’s captain.

“Men are ahead of us,” Tristen said, for he gathered that out of the insubstantial wind: indeed men were moving in the same direction, toward the wall. “Don’t venture,” he said quietly to Crissand, for Crissand had wondered, and fallen right into the wizard-sight, easy as his next breath. “Someone might hear.”

“My lord,” Crissand said, and ceased.

It was a fair ride farther to the old wall, where Aeself’s archers might be, and a dangerous prospect, to come up on archers at night, and with their badges invisible.

Idrys would have come there ahead of them, at least while the light lasted, and indeed forewarned them. But now there were two groups on the road, and Tristen set a moderately quicker pace, chasing that presence of many men in the dark, one a presence he knew.

It was right near the wall he knew that the other presence in the dark was indeed Drumman; and in that sure knowledge he let the gap close. The men ahead had heard them, and slowed, and stopped; and waited warily.

“Owl,” Tristen said, and, rarely obedient, Owl obliged him by a close pass, and by flapping heavily about his shoulder. He lifted a hand to brush Owl’s talons off his cloak, and drew a little of the light of the gray space to his hand, and to Owl, who flew off, faintly shining, here and there at once.

A murmur arose in the ranks behind, and even the Amefin blessed themselves; but Owl vanished among the trees and came back again, and all the while Tristen had never ceased to ride at the same steady pace.

Drumman knew, now, who commanded Owl, and waited, a line of riders in the dark beyond a small woods, as Owl came back to him, and then found a perch above.

“Lord Drumman,” Tristen said.

“My lord duke!” Drumman said. “Well met. I’d feared you were intruders.”

“None have crossed that I know,” Tristen said, and took Drum-man’s offered hand. “But Aeself and his men are along the river, and Cevulirn should have crossed to the Elwynim side. I need you and your men to hold the camp on this side.”

“And not cross!” Drumman protested. “We’re light horse, well drilled, and well set.”

“Then come with us,” Tristen said. He had withheld from the lady of Modeyneth their greatest concerns, but to Drumman he told all the truth of Ryssand’s action and Idrys’ fears as they rode, and by the time the wall darkened the night sky, Drumman understood the worst.

“Beset by his own,” Drumman said, as harshly as if he and Crissand’s house had never courted rebels or conspired against Cefwyn at all. It was honest indignation… so thoroughly the sentiments of the Amefin had shifted toward the Marhanen and the Lady of Elwynor.

“By his own, and planning to divide Elwynor between Tasmôrden and themselves,” Crissand said. “Which is no good for Amefel. We know where Tasmôrden’s ambitions would turn next.”

“Fine neighbors,” Drumman said, above the moving of the horses. “Fine neighbors they’d be, Ryssand or Tasmôrden. What are we to do?”

“Come at the enemy in Ilefínian and reach them before Cefwyn does,” Tristen said, but in his heart was Idrys’ fear, a traitor nearer Cefwyn than the ones they and Cefwyn already knew. Distance mattered in wizardry and Cefwyn being the point on which the whole eastern assault turned, he had no doubt all the wizardry of their enemy was bent on his overthrow.

They reached the wall, that reared dark and absolute across the road, with gates shut and the will of Lord Drusenan to defend it. It made him think of the maps, and how there was, along the riverside, the village of Anas Mallorn, and other small holdings scattered along the wedge of land before the rock, and all that way Idrys had to go, if he had not found a boat ready and able to take him on the water.

Yet Drusenan’s men had long carried on a secret commerce with Elwynor.

A challenge came down to them as they reached the gates, a sharp, “Who goes there?”

“His Grace of Amefel!” Crissand shouted up. “Meiden and Lord Drumman! Open up!”

“Open the gates!” came down from above them.

Then a second voice, Drusenan’s: “Welcome, my lord, to our wall! Welcome to the defense of Amefel!”

There was a brisk rub for the horses, and a welcome cup and pallets for a nap for the men, but for the lords, no rest—it was straight to a close council in the restored gatehouse of the wall, warm and lit with a small, double-wicked oil lamp.

In that place they took their cups of ale, declined food, for that they had already had, and spread out the map they brought from Henas’amef.

“The men you sent went through, never stopping but to say you were coming,” Drusenan said, “which is as much as we know, my lord.”

“Was a tall man with them?”

“A grim fellow, yes, my lord.”

“And left with them.”

“Went with them, my lord, and all of them pressing hard. And they had the bands, every man of them.”

There was no more, then, that he could do, and they nursed their cups of ale over small matters of supply and intent until the bottom of the cup, and then a brief, a desperate attempt at sleep and rest.

But Owl was abroad, still, and when Tristen shut his eyes he found himself in dizzying flight, wheeling above the darkened river, where a bridge stood completed, and men crossed by night.

Owl flew farther, and skimmed almost to the water, and up again, where the rocks rose sheer above the river.

Then back again, where a boat traveled under sail, and a dark man looked out from the prow, restless and worried. He traveled alone, that man, having left the guard behind. He was bidden rest on deck, but he could not sleep, and scanned the dark and rugged shore as the face of an enemy.

It was very far for Idrys to travel, even yet.

Owl flew on, and on, and swept his vision past hills to east and north, and Cefwyn’s camp was there, hundreds of tents, all set in orderly rows. He wished Owl to turn and show him Cefwyn, Owl veered off across the land, far, far, far, toward the east, Tristen thought, where the Quinaltine stood, where Efanor kept watch.

Of a sudden Owl turned, veered back again in a course so rapid the stars blurred and the world became dark, became the river, dark water, and cold.

Something was abroad in the night. Owl fled it, and that was never Owl’s inclination. For a long time Tristen had nothing in his sight but the ragged, raw cliffs and stony upthrusts of the hills, and then the gentler land of shepherds and orchards, laid bare of snow. The enemy hunted, hunted, pursued.

Fly, he wished Owl, for what stirred northward was aware of him, now, and turned attention toward him.

Well and good. Best it come to him. He wished it to turn to him, see him, assess what he was, with all the dangers inherent in the encounter. He abandoned stealth. He challenged the Shadow to the north, taunted it, all the while with fear in his heart… for in that way he had learned there were things older than himself, this was, indeed, older.

This was Hasufin, but it was more.

It was the Wind, and a dark Wind, and it had carried Hasufin and carried his soul still, but it was more than that: it had always lurked behind the veil, and now stood naked to the dark, the very heart of menace.

For a long, long while, his heart beating hard, he stared into that dark, having lost all reckoning of Owl.

But then something flew very near, and Owl called him urgently, reft him away as the thin sound broke the threads of the dream.

He plummeted to earth, aware of his own body again, and Drum-man and Uwen sleeping beside him.

But on his other side Crissand was awake, at the very threshold of the gray space. Crissand had felt the danger, and tried to oppose it.

—My lord? Crissand whispered.

—Be still, he said. Be very quiet. Something’s looking this way.

—What? Crissand wanted to know, and then turned his face toward the danger.

—Back! Tristen ordered him, and snatched them both from the gray winds before it could come near.

“A wizard,” Crissand said in a low and tremulous voice.

“I’m not sure,” Tristen said, knowing in his heart it was nothing so ordinary, that long ago something had entangled itself with Hasufin Heltain, as Hasufin had attempted to ensnare Orien Aswydd, and Aséyneddin in Elwynor.

Then it Unfolded to him with shattering force that this was indeed so, and that Mauryl himself had feared it.

This… this was in Hasufin’s heart.

It was not dispelled at Lewenbrook. It had not been dispelled in hundreds of years. It had only retreated. It was in the depths of the Quinal-tine. It was in every deep, dark place the Galasieni themselves had warded, and Hasufin had bargained with it, listened to it, welcomed it in his folly.

He had no choice but draw its attention to himself, now, for Cefwyn’s only defense was his blindness to magic and wizardry alike… and blindness was not enough, not against something with such ready purchase in Ryssand’s heart.

“I wish Idrys may hurry,” Tristen whispered into the dark, hearing Owl call again, and a third time, magical three. “I wish the winds behind him, and I wish he may come in time.”

“So all of us wish,” Crissand said, and fear touched his voice. “I saw a Shadow. Does it threaten the king?”

“It threatens everything,” Tristen said, and could not bid Crissand avoid it: could not bid any one of his friends avoid it. It was why they had come, why they pressed forward, why they had gone to war at all, and everything was at risk. “But sleep. Sleep now, while we dare sleep at all.”