Fortress of Dragons

INTERLUDE

Morning came gray and pale across hills not so different than Elwynor. Maids stirred about the fireplace, made tea, presented a breakfast of which Ninévrisë only wished a little bread, no honey in the tea. Afterward she sat in the warm middle of the room gazing at the pale light of the window, asking herself whether the bread had been wise at all.

Perhaps, instead, it was fear that churned inside her—fear and the wish never to have left her husband… not a wise wish, to be back with him, but the wish of her heart, all the same.

She was aware, on that level far beyond awareness of the hills and the tea and unwanted breakfast, of Emuin, half-asleep in his tower bed, an old man and increasingly frail; and of the boy Paisi, who made Emuin’s breakfast.

Paisi was worried, too, worried for the old man: loved him, an unaccustomed thing for Paisi, and more than a little surprising to the boy, who had loved few things and fewer people. He was not sure what to call those feelings, but Paisi was a fiercely protective soul, and set all his gifts to caring for the old man who had roused them in him.

He was suddenly aware of her eavesdropping on him—gifted in that way to an amazing extent, and not knowing anything he could properly do with that ability, either—and stopped and looked her direction in the gray space like any boy caught at anything. He truly disliked to be stared at or made conspicuous in any way, met such stares with hostility—but he regarded her differently, not with the unthought respect of a commoner for a lady, but a far more personal sense of connection.

He hurried about his last morning duties for Emuin, waked the old man, saw him safely seated at his breakfast, and then slipped out of the tower room and down the stairs from the tower to the lower hall.

Up, then, the central stairs.

She knew when he would arrive, knew that he suffered a sudden blush of awkwardness just outside her doors, his brash, common effrontery brought to an adamant halt by her guards.

Why had he come? He pursued his own curiosity, his own sense of duty. He had come to find her and to learn what she meant to that other concern of his, who slept with his mother in yet another room, with a baby’s untaught awareness.

She rose, went to her door, and opened it to find a gangling boy with wide dark eyes, face flushed with the vehemence of his argument with her guards.

“Lady,” he said, never once abashed, but with a quick bow.

“This is my ally,” she said to the guards. “He doesn’t know it yet, but he is.” She swept the boy inside, and the guards shut the door. All her attention was for a boy her heart told her defended a sleeping baby, for reasons unclear to the boy himself, and defended him even against the babe’s own Aswydd mother. It seemed to his loyal heart that the baby had had no defenders; and he had grown up with none but an old woman, and so he took it as his duty, himself, when no one else cared, to care for Tarien’s baby. All of that passion was in him, all at once, and for the babe’s sake.

In Tristen’s absence, he was here at her door—no accident.

And no boyish curiosity had brought him to her, but a wizard’s lively attachment to all the world around him: she felt it as she had felt her father’s curiosity about the world and never known it was uncommon: Paisi had the same tone of mind and heart, as if she were in the heart of her family again. They faced one another, and at the far remove of his tower, Emuin had stopped his breakfast, and had stopped it for a full several breaths, now, slowly grown present enough that they both knew.

“ ‘E ain’t sayin’ anything,” Paisi said faintly. “ ‘E ain’t upset wi’ me, but ‘e knows. The old man knows ever’thin’ ‘at goes on.”

“A very great wizard,” Ninévrisë said, “as I never shall be.” All her little wizardry had been bent to the north, in earnest hope of a whisper in the gray space, and now this boy distracted her from her watch and made her aware how constant it had been. It both gave her second thoughts, this potent distraction the boy posed, and made her question her own wisdom and her own fate in this war of powers.

It was a small fate, it might be; or a greater one. She had always thought of it as her fate—but seemingly now her fate had become wrapped about the child, her child, Cefwyn’s child. She had been proud, had commanded in the field, come close to power, and seen all her power over her fate unexpectedly involved in this union with Cefwyn. Now she saw it devolving upon their child, changed in direction and inevitable as the stoop of a hawk—to that extent she knew she had failed of all she purposed, and had failed in it even if she should rule in Elwynor. Neither Cefwyn’s rule nor hers, she foresaw, would suffice to settle the border or make a lasting peace. They became forerunners of one who might.

And this boy… this all-elbows, tousle-haired boy… this self-appointed warden of Cefwyn’s other son… he came to her to know what she was, and found himself too abashed to look her in the eye.

“Were you always with Emuin?” she asked, a more answerable question.

“No,” Paisi said. “ ‘Is Grace sent me to ‘im.”

“And do you like Emuin?”

Paisi blushed and looked abashed. “May be.”

“And how do you regard Tristen?”

“It ain’t for me to say about ‘Is Grace,” Paisi said in a breath. “ ‘E just is, is all.”

“Yet you do like him.”

“Aye,” Paisi admitted, with all his soul in that answer.

“And Lady Tarien?”

Silence was that answer.

“Do you love the Aswydds?” Ninévrisë asked. “Or not?”

A shake of Paisi’s head, a downward look, and a half glance. “Lady Tarien ain’t as bad.”

“And her son?”

That drew a look up, so direct and so open it held nothing back.

“ ‘E’s a babby, is all.”

“No,” she said, “not all. Never all.”

“Then what ‘e is… ‘e ain’t, yet.”

“All the same, he has a friend,” she said in the deep silence, for that was how she judged Paisi. “He has one friend; and that friend is a wizard, or will be. And when my son sees the light… will you love him, too?”

Paisi’s eyes darted hither and thither, as if he sought to see some answer just past her; but when he looked at her, and again she could see all the way to the depth of him. “I ain’t sighted,” Paisi said. “I don’t know, lady.”

“Yet will you wish him harm?” She asked for half, since she could not immediately have the whole. And seeing every certainty of her own life overturned and changed, she fought for her son’s certainties. “Or do you wish him well?”

“I ain’t ever wishin’ anybody harm,” Paisi said with a fierce shake of his head. “Master Emuin says a fool’d wish harm to anybody, on account of it’s apt to fly back in a body’s face an’ do gods know what, so, far as I can wish, I wish your babby’s happy.”

“So do I,” Ninévrisë said, and the bands about her heart seemed to loose. This boy, something said to her, this boy is worth winning. “I wish peace, and good, and all such things.”

Most of all she wished Cefwyn might see both his sons, and might come alive out of the war. She wished that more than she wished herself to rule; but for Elwynor itself she never gave up her wishes to see it become again what it had been.

She had lost confidence herself… had lost it the morning Tristen left, and did not know where to find it again in Henas’amef. She was out of place here, and regretted with all her heart that she had not ridden with Tristen, but she felt the presence of life within her and knew what dire thing their enemy had tried to do with Tarien’s babe. She would not chance that for her own son, Cefwyn’s son, the heir of two kingdoms.

“Do you think Lady Tarien will see me?” she asked.

“I don’t know she won’t,” Paisi said.

What Emuin thought of it was another matter: caution flowed from that quarter, for down in the depths, not so far away, was a tightly warded fear, one so closely bound to Tarien it gave Emuin constant worry.

But all the same she gathered the boy by the arm and went to the door and out, where she swept up half her Amefin bodyguard and walked up the stairs to the hall above.

There was a guard of state at Tarien’s door, too, and now Tarien Aswydd knew she had a visitor, and met that notion warily. They were not friends. They had never been. But she came with Paisi, and Paisi knew the old woman who stayed with Tarien, knew her as if she were kin of his, as for all Ninévrisë knew the old woman might be.

Only now she and Emuin and the elderly earl whom Tristen had left in charge of the town were the only authority; and she used hers to pass the doors of that apartment.

The place smelled of baby, and the gray space there was close with protections and wards that tingled along her skin and over Paisi’s. She could see them for a moment, a flare of blue in the foyer, and at the sunlit window beyond, and about the door that let them in.

They were not against her, but against any wizard who came here; against anyone who might wish to invade this small fortified and enchanted space. And at the very heart of it sat Tarien, tucked up with quilts in a chair by the fire, and in her arms her baby, and her attention was all for the child, nothing for her visitor.

So Tarien defended herself, and wove her little spells around and around her, like a lady spider in her den.

Ninévrisë found herself not even angry, the spells were so small and so many and so desperate… made of fear, every one.

“Good day,” she said, “Lady Tarien.”

Tarien did not look up, only hugged her child against her, her prize out of all that had happened. Tarien knew who visited her, and inasmuch as Tarien was aware of anything but her own child, knew there was another son, the son of two birthrights, when her son had no claim or right of even one.

They had no need to speak. She had no need to have come here, except to enter the center of Tarien’s attention instead of wandering its peripheries. She had nothing to gain: it was Tarien’s child who entered the world a beggar and hers who owned it all.

She felt an unexpected compassion for the two of them. And perhaps Tarien knew it, for she did look up, on the sudden and with an angry countenance.

“I offer you no spite,” Ninévrisë said. “No threat to your son. May I stay?”

Tarien turned her face away, but without the anger, only seeking escape.

“Then I shan’t,” Ninévrisë said. “But may I see him?”

Tarien unfolded the cloth about the baby’s face and shoulders; and it was a tiny, wizened face like any newborn, harmless to see him, but oh, such possibility of calamity, or of fellowship for her son.

She let go a sigh, and would have offered her finger to the baby’s tiny fist, but Tarien turned him away and hugged him close.

Cefwyn’s son. Elfwyn, he was named, like the last High King, and half brother to her own babe, when he was born.

She might summon her guards, exert her power, seize the baby, bring him into her own care, for good or for ill, and Tarien’s history made her think that might be a wiser course… wiser for them all, Tarien’s welfare discounted.

But her father had dinned into her the principles of wizardry, if not the practice of it, that action brought action, that an element out of Place strove until it found that Place. Striving was not what she wished from this child, only peace, and in peace she was willing to leave him, with only a parting word to his mother.

“He has one hope besides his mother’s love,” Ninévrisë said with all deliberation, “and that will be his father’s grace.”

“Cefwyn will die in Elwynor,” Tarien said fiercely. “Lord Tristen will be my son’s protector. They hail Tristen High King. High King! And he favors my son.”

She had not intended to be nettled by the lady, or to take omens from anything the lady said or threatened; but that claim struck too near the mark, far too near.

Paisi quietly tugged at her sleeve. “Master Emuin’ll have me hide for bringin’ ye here. Come, lady. Come away.”

“The lady deceives herself,” Ninévrisë said, both in anger and in utter, steadfast conviction, and it occurred to her to say more than that, that Cefwyn would come alive out of the war, and that Tristen would keep his word, and that nothing the Aswydds had ever done had helped them: all this generation of Aswydds had done brought one long tumble of fortunes toward Tarien’s solitude and imprisonment.

But her father had taught her to say less than she knew, so she gathered up her dignity and her freedom and left with them.

It was not a movement of her own child she felt in the doorway of that place, but his presence at least, an awareness of a life within her, and a life bound to all the events on the river and northward.

“Lady!” Paisi cried. Emuin himself had roused at the malice Tarien flung, wizardous malice, and he struck it down, with the firm intent to take Tarien’s babe from her care.

—No, Ninévrisë said, steady in her place.

But guards clearly had their orders. At that outcry they had moved. Ninévrisë pressed herself against the wall as armed men rushed the room and from then matters went from bad to worse, wards flaring, wizardry striking, wizardry countering wizardry, Emuin’s, hers, Tarien’s, even Paisi’s, and the guards oblivious to all. Tarien’s shrieks pierced the very walls, stirred the shadows in the depths, rang through the very stones—a mother’s cries, a mother’s curses, that lanced through to the bones of another woman with child.

“Have a care!” Ninévrisë cried, as in her witness a guard wrested the child from Tarien’s hands, and another pulled Tarien away toward the window. Ninévrisë reached for the child herself, as Paisi did, and to her arms the guard yielded the infant.

The baby moved and cried, upset amid all the anger. She held the small bundle, and looked at Tarien’s white face, pitying, finally, after her fright and her anger: pity, against Tarien’s grieving rage.

“No one will harm him,” Ninévrisë assured her. “Be still. Be still! You may yet have him back. Only wish no harm, yourself. Hush.”

With great breaths Tarien grew calmer, and reached for the child, which she would have given, but Emuin would not, and the guards would not, and Tarien struck at them with curses Emuin turned.

“I’ll call Gran,” Paisi said. “She ain’t far.”

Indeed there was an old woman aware of the child, and already on her way, out of breath and distressed. Ninévrisë turned away hugged the unwanted and crying child close against her, trying to stop the strife within the room and within the gray space, with Tarien’s cries still in her ears.

An old woman arrived, the nurse, to whom Ninévrisë willingly ceded the child, and that alone seemed to quiet Tarien.

But the gray space quivered with wrong and with grief, and if a mother’s just grief alone could rend the wards of the fortress apart, Tarien attempted it.

“The nurse may have him here to be fed, while the guards wait in the foyer,” Ninévrisë said; it was the only mending of the situation she could think of. “And the nurse may care for him next door. If you mend your wishes, Lady Tarien, perhaps you can win more. But make your peace with Emuin, not with me. Ask Tristen when he comes. Don’t cast away all your chances, only to spite me and Cefwyn.”

“He will die” Tarien said.

“No,” she said, more than determined, “he will not.”

They both wished, each roused the winds in the gray space and, parting company, did not part. There was battle joined, harm with help, and Ninévrisë walked away with her child still her own.

Tarien, however, could not say so… and warred against them now. The wizard-threat from the north had turned away from her, and she might have won compassion. But jealousy would not let her accept charity from a rival: nothing had ever prepared Tarien Aswydd for kindness, and she resented it as she resented all things exterior to her own will.

By that she set a course and nothing would divert her.

CHAPTER 1

From the height of Danvy’s back Cefwyn cast a long look on the Lenúalim, a view that included Lord Maudyn’s long-defended bridge and water running higher than he had ever seen it, dark, laden with mud and debris from the unseasonable thaw.

But thank the all-patient gods and whatever friendly wizardry intermittently supported his own plans, the rains had stopped, the debris had not damaged the pylons and the high water had not delayed the installation of the bridge decking. His fast-moving couriers had bidden Lord Maudyn start that process early, well before his arrival.

The last section was in place as of yesterday. Lord Maudyn had immediately enlarged his camp on the far side of the river—a camp he had had in place for months, placed and supplied by small boats and rafts, to be sure of that far bridgehead.

And as late as this morning when the main army had arrived, the far bank had still produced no hostile action against that camp, which now was due to enlarge.

To Cefwyn that far shore remained a mystery of ancient maps and his wife’s best recollections, a land veiled in brush and scattered woods—Ninévrisë had assured him the land was much the same as the land this side, rolling hills, a north shore rugged with cliffs which were the same as the high banks on the south.

That was the troublesome spot, those cliffs to the west of this bridge. There the Lenúalim ran deep and turbulent, and bent sharply around in its course through the stony hills as it turned toward Amefel. What tantrum of the all-wise gods had split that great ridge of rock and sent a river through it he was not certain, but on the hither side of that ridge two moderate-sized rivers flowed into the Lenúalim’s current… one from the Elwynim side of the river, and the other here, their own tame Assurn. The northern river entered as clear water. The Lenúalim was usually murky green and the southern Assurn a pale brown stream. The colors habitually stayed distinct for a time until they merged into the Lenúalim’s flood… so Lord Maudyn informed him, Lord Maudyn sharing a scholar’s curiosity about such things.

And on any other venture, even his skirmishes in the south, he would have been curious to see whether the melt and flood had left any vestige of that three-colored joining… but he had grown grimly single-minded since he had kissed his wife good-bye.

That he now fought a war against his own side as well as the enemy had not so much divided his attention as sharpened his wits and made him scour up the good advice he had had from counselors now absent… advice which, ironically, he might have been less zealous to follow if they were with him. He became responsible for himself, alone in a host that took his orders and offered him protection. But Ryssand’s influence went into unexpected places.

Mindful of that fact, wary of Ryssand’s spies, he kept his ordinary guards close to him… men in the scarlet of the Dragon Guard, men sworn to protect his back from any assault. If he was horsed and watching the river, so they were. If he dismounted to go among the troops, they dismounted and went close to him, in case some man of another lord’s guard had some unguessed connection to Rys-sand and his allies.

But they had come this far without incident or assault, and with remarkably few delays. This morning he watched the collapse of the last tents, and the movement of carts within the lines of last night’s camp gathering up the bundled canvas in neat order.

Even yet there was no motion from the enemy, but he kept a wary eye toward the far bank. The last information Lord Maudyn relayed to him had Tasmôrden still enjoying his victory at hapless Ilefínian, and taking no action toward the steady enlargement of Lord Maudyn’s forces… but Tasmôrden could not be ignorant of all that was happening here: Ryssand would not permit Tasmôrden to remain ignorant, by what he suspected.

So was this Elwynim earl an utter fool, lazing in Ilefínian, or was he a man trying to make his enemy commit himself too far, too fast?

He sat Danvy’s restless back, with his guards around him. He watched, wishing above all else that Ninévrisë were here to see this morning, the fulfillment of the hotly argued marriage treaty and most especially of his personal and far more tender oath to her. He wondered, since wizardry accounted for so much that mere Men called coincidence, whether by some remote stretch of the imagination she might know where he was at this moment.

And if she did know, he hoped she knew he thought of her.

Finally, he said to her in his imagination. Finally, and in spite of all their objections, your banner is here. Your people will see it.

A sudden redirection of his guards’ attention alerted him to a rider coming from the road beyond the camp, a courier, as it appeared: the red coat was faintly visible even in the dawn, even at this range.

But as the rider came closer it was the red of the Dragon Guard, and the horse well mudded, as if it had been hours under way, this early in the dawn.

“From the capital, perhaps.” It might be a courier from Efanor. Gods save them from disasters… or some move of Ryssand there.

As he came closer still, the rider’s fair hair blew from under the edges of his silver helm in a very familiar way.

“Anwyll!” he exclaimed to his guards, who were moving their horses into his path to prevent this precipitate approach. “No, let him come. This is a man I trust.”

The guards all the same arrayed themselves a little to the fore, but Anwyll it indeed was, and the junior captain he had sent with Tristen reined his weary horse to a slow and respectful pace as he approached and moved in among the guards’ horses.

“Your Majesty,” Anwyll said, out of breath as he drew rein. Dust and weariness made him look shockingly twice his years, or perhaps service under Tristen had aged him in a single winter, but the eyes were still bright and undaunted. “I went to Guelemara first, Your Majesty, thinking you’d be there, but His Highness said you’d gone on. And he sent this message.” Anwyll pulled a flattened, hard-used scroll from within his coat, and leaned in the saddle to offer it, but one of the guards intercepted it and passed it on instead, a document heavy with a prince’s red wax seal… and a white Quinaltine ribbon. That was odd. Was Efanor lacking red ones?

“Lord Tristen sent, too,” Anwyll said. “But would commit nothing to writing. He bade me say…” Anwyll caught his breath: he was sweating under the spattering of mud. “He bade me march quickly from the river… with the carts… which I did, and they are coming, Your Majesty, but behind me. My company…” He pointed to the south, the road by which they also had come. “A day behind. To save the horses and the axles.”

“What did my brother say? What did Tristen say?” Cefwyn asked sharply. Everything Anwyll had done he was sure was well done, but Anwyll had a way of telling a superior everything but what he wanted most to know, getting all the small details in order.

“His Highness wishes Your Majesty the gods’ favor. His Grace of Amefel says that Tasmôrden has claimed the High Kingship, that he holds court in Ilefínian.” For two things Anwyll found breath, then a third. “And says beware Ryssand.—Your Majesty, I saw his banners an hour back.”

“Ryssand’s? Where? The north road?” About an hour back was where the north road came in to join this one, at least an hour back as hard riding might set it; and that was indeed the road by which Ryssand and Murandys might both arrive, inland but more direct than the winding riverside track from the fishing villages.

“A road comes in…” Anwyll began to describe it with his hands.

“I know the road! The rest of Tristen’s news, man. Spit it out, never mind the niceties. Is it his wishes for good weather—or is it possibly news I need?”

“His Grace did also wish you good health, and said he hoped for good weather—” Gods save him, he saw how Anwyll had always to remember things in order, a damnable fault in a messenger.

“Then? Say on, man! What else did he send you to say?”

“He sent Cevulirn to the river, to my camp, to my former camp, that is, and he himself, His Grace, that is, he of Amefel—will join Imor, Ivanor, Lanfarnesse, Olmern and forces out of Amefel, and cross to receive whatever force of the enemy Your Majesty drives toward him. Most, he begs Your Majesty be careful of Ryssand.”

“A very good idea, that,” Cefwyn said, desperately frustrated in his hopes for something more current and more than the damning echo of all his instruction to Tristen. If Tristen, obeying his orders, stayed out of the fight, and sent no better than this, it greatly concerned him—and if ever Tristen should violate his express orders or chase off after butterflies, he wished it would be now.

But clearly his message had not reached Tristen before Anwyll had left… let alone Ninévrisë: Anwyll was greatly delayed, having gone to Guelemara before setting out in this direction. It was a memorable ride—small wonder he had mislaid a detachment of Dragon Guard and a train of carts between here and the capital.

And Anwyll’s spotting Ryssand near him redeemed all possible fault.

“Take a fresh horse,” Cefwyn said, and drew off his glove, red leather with the Dragon of the Marhanen embroidered in gold on the back. “Use this for authority, take what you need, and join me across the river.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty, but my men…”

“Will follow Ryssand. We’ll not wait. Go!” Cefwyn reined Danvy around and rode along the shore, taking his guard with him and leaving the exhausted captain to follow as he could.

His rapid course along the riverside drew attention. The tents were each folded down by now, precise parcels of canvas awaiting the wagons to gather them. The men were saddling their horses, and the officers looked sharply toward him. In particular he spied Captain Gwywyn of the Prince’s Guard, where the regimental standards of the Dragons, the Prince’s Guard, and the Guelens all stood with the few banners of the middle lands.

He rode up to Gwywyn in a spatter of loose earth, and with a sweep of his arm indicated the bridge. “The companies and the contingents to horse, now, and across the bridge. No delay.”

There was no question of the readiness of the bridge to bear the carts. The Dragon standard of the Marhanen was flying bravely across the river, from the other end of the bridge, along with the banner of Panys. Lord Maudyn waited for him, had established himself visibly on that other side and indulged himself in no luxury: it would be a camp to use as a base, to move on in another day: those were the orders.

“Sound the trumpets!” Gwywyn shouted out to the heralds. “Advance the standards! All the army to follow!”

“The carts to follow Osanan!” Cefwyn shouted, riding past the quartermaster. “And wait for no one else! On to the bridge! One cart at a time, sir! If that bridge fails us, best you be on it!”

The trumpeters gathered themselves into a ragged, then unified call to standards. The banner-bearers set themselves immediately to horse, to ride past and claim their regimental and provincial colors. Officers were up, and ordered their men.

His guard was around him. The banner-bearers thundered past him at a good clip, a moving bright curtain of the Marhanen Dragon and the Tower and Checker of the Regent of Elwynor preceding the colors of Llymaryn, Panys, Carys, Sumas, and Osanan, banners which flowed back to their regiments. The Dragon and the Tower went where he rode, and ahead of him, with the sergeants behind him bawling out orders and cursing the laggards.

Officers shouted, horses protested, and the oxen that moved the baggage train lowed in their yokes. Disorder overtook the laggards, companies mounting up with only half their tents set into the carts, which thus would wait for the quartermaster’s men themselves to gather up the bundles, and those carts thus would fall behind the column as the whole army unwound into a line of march as quickly as companies thus surprised could fall in behind their standard. Carters cursed and soldiers hastened their horses as if devils were after them all the way to the bridgehead, onto heavy, safe timbers whereon five riders could go abreast; and by now the expectation in every heart must be of Elwynim descending on the camp from ambush— could anything else bring such precipitate orders?

They had not their full load of baggage: a good deal of it he had sent out to Lord Maudyn ahead of time, and all winter long, in the lack of carts, Maudyn had moved it by repeated trips, tempting the enemy to reach for it… but no such thing had happened.

So, indeed, now he committed them to the other side, and tempted fate and the gods twice by leaving his quartermaster to manage the crossing: trust the drivers not to hurl themselves and their teams into the river by too much haste, and his quartermaster not to crowd up on the bridge—he knew his quartermaster, a steady officer of the Dragons: that man was no fool, to bring more than one heavy wagon onto the bridge at a time, and would not, not if pikes had to prevent it. To cross in haste to defend Maudyn was a contingency they had foreseen: that the Elwynim enemy was not the reason of their crossing was beside the point—the man would not fail him.

And as he came off the bridge and onto the soil of Elwynor, he had clear view of the banners of Ylesuin and Panys set among the rocks and the height that bordered the road.

“Ride on!” he ordered Gwywyn, just behind him, and he drew himself and his bodyguard aside from the road, keeping view of the bridge, reassured in the orderly progress of disciplined troops, the Dragons setting the example and the quartermaster’s guards marshaling those who came behind into a calm, rapid order.

It was the lords’ contingents that worried him: there were the men who might grow anxious and press forward. An armored man that fell into those deep, cold waters was a dead man, no question about it; and he had worried for the provincial musters if they came to any trial at arms about this crossing. His cleverness in setting the army across and leaving Ryssand behind his cart train could bring disaster on them if some unit panicked.

But for the foremost hazard of their crossing, he was just as glad to move at speed: if ever Tasmôrden had a real chance at a hard, early strike at them, the best chance for him was during their crossing. He had needed to be very sure of Lord Maudyn’s scouts to have camped as they had, with the army in sight, but Lord Maudyn’s men in reach. He had expected an attack to come on Lord Maudyn in the winter, or again when the decking went on. He had most dreaded an attack at their arrival, but last night, when they had camped with Lord Maudyn on one side of the water and himself on Ylesuin’s side, there had been no threat and they had seen no reason to press a crossing and encampment into the dark.

The forces of Ylesuin would have had the leisure to straggle onto Elwynim soil at a stroll had they wished. That in itself prompted a leader in opposition to question his own perceptions and Tasmôrden’s qualities as a leader of men.

Dared they trust, as Maudyn reported, that Tasmôrden indeed still lingered among the plundered luxuries of Ilefínian, his troops ranging the wine shops, so dissipated they could not field a squad of cavalry?

Or dared he think that Tasmôrden’s lack of response was because Tasmôrden chose to let Ryssandish and Guelens fight a war of their own… that he delayed in hope of Ryssand’s arriving forces.

“Your Majesty.”

Anwyll had found a horse and crossed among the Dragons, a man at loose ends, lacking a command and lacking orders.

“Stay close.” Trusted men were rare, and by conscious decision he trusted Anwyll at the same level as he trusted his own guard: if there were perfidy in this man, he counted on Tristen to have smelled it out and never to have trusted him with messages. That was his first thought.

But his second asked whether Tristen was infallible. Had Tristen not sent him that precious lot of Guelens, and the head of the Amefin Quinalt, who had wreaked such havoc?

Then he recalled Efanor’s letter, unregarded in his possession since Anwyll had brought it to him. He had tucked it into his belt, another abuse of the scroll, and when he drew it out he found its parchment and its seal alike cracked but not yet separated, a small roll almost overwhelmed by the honors of its seal and binding… no question of its origin as he pulled the ribbon free, for he knew the seal as he knew his own, Efanor’s authentic seal, with a deliberate imperfection in it, a flaw at the edge, as his own gillyflower seal bore a small mark in one petal.

But why a white satin ribbon, the like of which the Holy Father used, and why was it not the red of the Marhanen?

He broke the seal and unrolled the little scroll in the stiff wind that came down the river.

I take the captain for a reliable man, Efanor had written, and send him on with the carts which I fear now are too late to serve. Tristen has been here in Guelemara and has banished some sort of darksome unpleasantness from the very altar of the Quinaltine.

Tristen in Guelemara, Cefwyn thought, dumbfounded and dismayed at once. Had Tristen marched for the capital? And darksome unpleasantness?

… Neither I nor the Holy Father fully understand the means of his visitation, but he pursued some irruption of evil influence daring the vicinity of the altar, and established a line of defense which he drew on the stones. He said that I must guard this place and walk this line and pray continually…

There were several wonders in this cramped, tightly written letter… not least of which others was the word pray within Tristen’s instructions. Pray, was it, now?

And Tristen had not marched in at the head of an army, either, if that failure to understand the means meant something magical.

Flitting hither and thither like the irreverent pigeons?

To Guelemara, was it now?

Then why not here, friend of my heart? Come to me here! Oh, gods, could I wish you by me!

And where have I sent Nevris? To what care?

But he had no magic, no wizardry: Emuin’s most careful questions in his boyhood had found not a trace, not a breath, not a whisper of wizard-gift in him. The Quinalt and Teranthine gods were the only recourse of a magic-blind man, and he had no faith Tristen would hear him or the gods.

Yet Tristen had flitted his way into the Quinaltine, had he? And surely Ninévrisë was safe with Emuin in Henas’amef, if Emuin had not taken to flying about the land in his company.

And praying? If it were not his brother who had written that word, he would not have believed the letter, but it was, and freely so, Efanor’s cursive hand.

This I do, Efanor had written, continually, with the Holy Father and a number of the priests on whom we rely. I fear to say in this letter all that I understand and even more so do I fear to say all that I suspect. Against what enemy we contend we remain largely uncertain. I fear this lonely watch exceedingly and at times feel there is indeed some looming threat behind that Line, although my eyes can plainly see the holy altar beyond it.

I ask myself whether the hallow here—if hallow it be—might have to do with the untimely death of the late Patriarch, so bloody and recent in these precincts.

Well enough, Cefwyn thought to himself: Efanor dared not lay in writing that they had knowingly hanged a corpse for another man’s sin; and for that reason might the old Patriarch be looking for his killer? Shadows, Tristen had called them.

But at other times, Efanor wrote, I have worse fears and recall all that I have heard regarding the events at Lewen field, as if this presages some attempt at sorcerous entry into Guelemara, at this holiest of sites, and some threat against the capital and the Holy Quinaltine itself. I have hesitated to write to you, knowing the immense concerns which face you in your undertaking, and indeed, you left me to attend such matters, as within my competency. I pray you know I shall continue to stand my watch.

Yet to advise you of these things should I fall, which gods forbid, I have my one opportune messenger at hand and dare not keep him. I have learned to trust my doubts and to make friends of them, and of all courses before me, I am most uneasy with the thought of remaining silent regarding Lord Tristen’s instruction and his actions here, whether by magic or wizardry or whatever agency. If wizardry comes against us here, we believe our task is to prevent it.

Meanwhile I have heard nothing from Ryssand nor of Ryssand.

The good gods bless you and Her Grace. The gods attend your steps and guide you day and night. The gracious gods bring you success and honor.

I send you my devotion and my love.

The last was crabbed into a bend around the edge of the parchment… Efanor had made the message scroll itself as small as he could, so that Anwyll might tuck it away unseen… remarkable, Cefwyn reflected… remarkable and shameful, that they were brought to this pass of secrecy, all for Ryssand and Ryssand’s daughter.

Wizardry, Efanor said. Wizardry. Tristen in Guelemara, when other and reliable reports, even Ninévrisë’s dream, he remembered now, though for a moment he had forgotten it, had said he was in Henas’amef.

What in hell was he to think?

“Did His Highness mention anything to you of Lord Tristen coming to Guelemara?” he asked Anwyll, and saw Anwyll’s surprise.

“No, Your Majesty, no such thing! It was Lord Tristen’s intent to go to the river.”

“To the river, but on the other side of that cursed rock,” Cefwyn said half to himself, for it was that impassable barrier which kept him from going aside to Tristen’s camp and making one their plan of assault on Ilefínian. Weathered knolls of barren stone and deep pockets of earth bearing tangled brush in the crevices made it land unfit for goats, let alone any hope of joining their forces either side of the river, not until they were most of the way to Ilefínian, which sat at the point of that spear of a ridge.

And had Tristen indeed followed his silly pigeons over that and appeared to Efanor in the capital?

Efanor had surely dreamed. Had a vision and convinced his priestly supporters. Tristen was on the other side of that great range of hills; and Ninévrisë would confirm Tristen in his plan to go to the river and cross and bring him whatever support he might need… to Tasmôrden’s extreme discomfiture. Pray for that, brother!

If there were that much force to this wizardous threat Efanor named, surely then Ninévrisë would have read it in her bespelled scrap of a letter and told him so: it was, then, nothing so extreme— only one of Efanor’s dreams, that before now had set him to religious excesses. The kingdom was in danger and his brother, with all his other excellent qualities, saw visions.

So whatever had happened in the capital, whatever unholy threat Efanor foresaw, whatever the truth of visions… he left that to priests as out of his reach and beyond his advice. What he had more to fear in his vicinity was the equally unholy union of enemies, Parsy-nan and Cuthan, Ryssand and Tasmôrden, all conniving together, and now Ryssand coming up behind him.

There was the thought to make him anxious. He very much doubted Ryssand would do anything so overt as to attack his own king’s baggage train, and it was equally difficult to think that Ryssand could plan anything so reckless as an assault on his back… but it was not impossible to think.

Ryssand had buried a son, dead at Cevulirn’s hand in this exchange of rancor and wedding proposals. Artisane still fluttered around Efanor and had still hoped, so appearances were, down to the day the army marched.

But considering how Ryssand came chasing after the army with his own muster… his own very large muster, which might have with it not only Murandys but Nelefreissan and Teymeryn and all the northern lands… did not fill him with confidence.

Could they all, all the north intend to strike at him? Did they conspire together, so blindly hateful of his rule that they would gamble on Tasmôrden’s often-bartered promises—or was Ryssand, even Ryssand, innocent and coming to the defense of the realm?

He watched the last of the Guelen Guard come off the bridge, last of the standing regiments, and saw the first of the provincial forces, the contingent with young Rusyn, ride after… no great number of foot, except those Panys had brought.

The army he had fielded after all was, as Tristen had once advised him, nearly all horse. It was not near the number of men the lords could have raised in the peasant levies, if they had called in the infantry, as they had planned—he had foregone that, at the very last, had overset long-held plans as the carts delayed and their information from across the river painted him a mobile, smaller enemy than Aséyneddin had led against him. The army he had gathered still would not move as fast as the light horse Tristen and Cevulirn alike had recommended, but they would move and regroup faster than heavy infantry.

And if thanks to Ryssand they had now to abandon all but a few tents in favor of rapid movement into Elwynor, so be it and damn Ryssand: the weather was tolerable and they could manage. They could forage. Without Ninévrisë, he no longer hoped overmuch for a great rising of folk loyal to her banner: their best information portrayed a land cowed and beaten by conflicting warlords, no man daring raise his head. But all the same he carried her banner aloft and hoped to receive some support from the locals, if only in their declining to face him for Tasmôrden.

And at the worst of Ryssand’s treachery, they still could survive long enough to reach Ilefínian, against every principle of Guelen warfare that declared the baggage train had to set the rate of march and that they must not leave it vulnerable to attack. For what he did now, he cast back to older models, to Tashanen, to Barrakketh himself: they must not extend themselves so fast and so far from their lines they lost control of the roads on which they marched and the supplies which moved on those roads, but they had to risk the tents… there was no kingdom to go back to if he retreated now, and no hope of victory if he enmeshed himself in Ryssand’s schemes. Defeat Tasmôrden, and he would have a far more tractable Lord Ryssand to deal with. Fail to defeat Tasmôrden… and he would die here. That was the truth.

And the less visible truth was that the few carts they had and Lord Maudyn’s extensive, well-set camp were neither one the most reliable source of supply. No, in fact: the most reliable road and the supply he knew beyond a doubt they could count on was not what he played hop-skip with in evading Ryssand and not what he had spent a winter laying out. It was (granted Tristen had not flitted off with his pigeons) the supply Tristen had established on the other side of what he had come to think of as that damned rock.

In Amefel. That was where Ninévrisë was, that was where Tristen was, that was where Emuin was.

It was where Cevulirn was, and Sovrag, and Pelumer, and gods, even that poker of a man, Umanon of Imor. They were the same company as had stood against the Shadow at Lewenbrook. There was supply at Anwyll’s former camp, and that he did not doubt.

There was the solid support he could trust.

As for the wagons and the carts and the pack train he had… he sat his horse at Anwyll’s side and watched that line of men and carts across the river, hastening about its business of gathering up the camp and following the army.

“You said Ryssand was at the north road,” he remarked to Captain Anwyll. “Approaching this road, or already on it?”

“Approaching, Your Majesty. I saw his banner at a distance.”

“His and no others?”

“That was all I saw, but there were very many men, Your Majesty.”

That Ryssand had been still in the distance when Anwyll passed, that was good news.

He sat his horse watching and watching as group after group crossed the bridge, and in good time Lord Maudyn rode up to find him, from his camp where they might well have been expecting for some time to receive him and to pay him some courtesy of welcome.

Instead Lord Maudyn, good-hearted man, had ridden to him.

“Your Majesty,” Maudyn said, and Cefwyn was glad to see him, and offered his hand across the gap between their horses.

“Well done,” he said to Maudyn Lord of Panys. “Very well done. Did you hear that Ryssand is coming?”

Maudyn’s countenance assumed a bleak quiet, and then Maudyn cast a curious look toward the bridge, where the first of the baggage carts waited to cross, behind Osanan.

“The baggage train will cross, one by one,” Cefwyn said. “Which may be hours, to move all that. And Ryssand can wait. My baggage has to stay close with the army. If he’s late, so be it. We’ll be moving on to the next camp; there’ll be no settling here.”

He was satisfied now that the carts were beginning to roll. Ryssand would arrive too late to join the crossing of the provincial contingents. He would have to wait, he and those with him, until the last of the baggage train had rolled across the bridge, and that could be very slow, where it involved ox teams, and axles heavy-laden with canvas and iron.

It was time for the scouts to move out and be sure of their night’s camp, that much closer to Ilefínian.

Ryssand could cross today and spend his next hours getting his baggage train across. Ryssand might overtake him today. He might not.

It was time to give the orders to the scouts, and to look to where they would stay this night, in weather fair enough to enable a camp without the tents. It was graven in stone that Guelenmen camped under canvas and made a solid camp at night, that Guelenmen moved at a deliberate pace dictated by the slowest oxcart in the baggage train: Ryssand would not expect this.

He might simply unhitch the teams and let the carts stand on the road, such as it was, completely filling it, so that the forces trying to pass them must struggle through the brush and limbs that fringed it. Perhaps amid the trees and thorn vines, Ryssand might gather he was being slighted.

More to the point, so might the lords with Ryssand see where Ryssand’s leading had gotten them, and then weigh how angry they were willing to make their king, in enemy territory, when Ryssand was being outmaneuvered by oxcarts.

Let them ask themselves then in a second moment of sober reflection how far they could trust Tasmôrden to do what he had promised and to refrain from attacking them: Tasmôrden’s promises and representations might ring somewhat hollow in their ears once they found themselves chasing their king deeper and deeper into Tasmôrden’s reach.

One outraged, angry man might be a fool far quicker and far longer than his contentious allies.

That was what Cefwyn hoped, at least, as he turned Danvy to ride between Maudyn and Anwyll.

“We’ll go on,” he said, “gain as much ground as we can.”

“Prudence, Your Majesty,” Maudyn said.

“Do you trust your scouts?”

“To report what they believe, without question. But—”

“Do they believe the way is clear?”

“Yet to push ahead, against a walled town, Your Majesty, so precipitately, and without the preparation—”

“You’ve made the preparation. We have a camp, do we not, on this side of the Lenúalim?”

“Absolutely so, Your Majesty.”

“Dug in, canvassed, well set, and provided with a rampart.”

“So we have, Your Majesty.”

“Then the gods for Ylesuin and devil take all traitors! These are horses, are they not?”

“Indubitably, so, Your Majesty.”

“And capable of setting us closer to the enemy faster than the oxen could.”

“But without preparation, and wearing down their strength—”

“We’ll rest in time. I’ve had a letter from my brother and one from Amefel, and I’ll not wager our lives there’s not wizardry in the stew—wizardry helping Tasmôrden deceive our scouts, make foul seem fair, right seem wrong… no disparagement of your scouts, none! Lewenbrook showed us all what wizardry can do on the field, and gods send we don’t see the like of that again.”

“Gods save us from that, Your Majesty.”

“But it’s a possibility. Something went on at Lewen field, something beyond Aséyneddin’s wizardry, that Emuin never has told me… Tristen, gods save us, tried to explain, but he doesn’t seem to know either, and that worries me.”

He had never been so frank in council, not with the good Quinalt lords pricking up their ears and ready to bolt. But to Maudyn and to Anwyll, who had served with Tristen, he delivered the truth that, before, only the inmost circle of his advisors had dealt with. And Lord Maudyn heard it in attentive silence.

“Mauryl died,” Cefwyn said, “and sent Tristen in his place. Tristen was there at Lewenbrook, but neither he nor Emuin seems to know what was in the cloud that rolled down the field. Tristen said he went to Ynefel during that battle—I don’t know the truth of that. Emuin was lying abed in Henas’amef, and has no idea. And all along, everyone’s assumed because we came off that field alive that Aséyneddin was the center of it all: that he’s in hell and that’s the end of it. I wonder.”

“Lightning struck the Quinaltine,” Maudyn said.

“That it did.”

“A Sihhë coin turned up in the offering,” Maudyn said further.

‘‘That was a damnable piece of trickery! And it obscured the real fact.”

“Which was, Your Majesty?”

“That lightning struck the roof of the Quinaltine!… and robbed me of Tristen, of Emuin, of Cevulirn, ultimately, all of Ryssand’s connivance.”

“The lightning surely wasn’t Ryssand’s doing,” Maudyn said.

“That’s the point, isn’t it? The lightning was something Ryssand couldn’t manage. But it happened, and damned inconvenient of it to hit there and not the Bryalt shrine, wasn’t it?”

It was too far remote from the lives of ordinary men. Lord Maudyn regarded him as if willing to agree with his king, but unsure to which proposition he should agree.

“I suppose so,” Maudyn said.

“It stole Tristen from me. Emuin would warn me that was no accident. Do you think Tasmôrden can move the lightning?”

“I have no knowledge of Tasmôrden himself, except as an earl of Elwynor, a traitor to his lord…”

“Exactly! Exactly so. No knowledge of the man except as an earl among other earls, a traitor among other traitors, no special gifts, no repute, no great allegiance among the Elwynim, would you say?”

“He pays his troops. He hires brigands.”

“The Saendal. And pays them with the goods they loot from Elwynim they’ve attacked. Is this a man to inspire loyalty? Is this a king?”

“I would say not, Your Majesty.”

“I would say not, as well. No king, no great man, no man loved by the people… would you not say a wizard, if he devoted himself to lead his own people to war, might not…” Cefwyn waggled the fingers of his off hand, Danvy’s reins lying in the other. “… conjure better?”

“Master Emuin hardly fits the model.”

“Ah. Master Emuin. Mauryl. Leave aside Tristen. He’s his own creature. But wizards, now!”

“I don’t follow Your Majesty.”

“The Sihhë-lords ruled. Ruled, with an iron hand. But do you see ambition in Emuin? Did you see it in Mauryl Gestaurien?”

“Kingmaker, they called Mauryl. And Kingsbane.”

“But did you see him rule?”

“I saw the man not at all, Your Majesty.”

“You see?”

“I don’t see, Your Majesty.”

“He didn’t rule. Nor would Emuin. Gods, you couldn’t persuade him to be king if you tossed in a shelf of books and a wagonload of parchment… when would a wizard practice his craft, if he ruled?”

“The Sihhë ruled.”

“But that’s just the point. The Sihhë don’t have to study. Tristen doesn’t have to study.” The conclusions poured in on him like a fall of stars from the heavens—or levin bolts on a priestly roof. “Wizards spend their whole lives at it. So if Tasmôrden’s sotted in Ilefínian and has to hire his soldiers, because the peasantry’s run to Amefel and the other lords are in hiding, such as survive—is this wizardry? If I were a wizard, I’d do better than hire my troops. I’d bespell them to adore me.”

“Yet does Emuin, Your Majesty, improve Ryssand?”

“I don’t think it occurs to him to improve Ryssand.”

“I think he would do what he could.”

“Yet what he can do is limited by what he will do, and what he will do is bounded in the stars, and books, and charts, and seas of ink. He’s the greatest wizard left alive, and I’d have him improve Ryssand, yes, if Emuin would, or could. On that score I know something, and the answer is that he can’t, not really, not directly, not so a man couldn’t rise up and march contrary to wizardry, else what chance would we have stood at Lewenbrook? Can you riddle me that?”

“I daresay,” Maudyn said in a quiet voice, and by now they were coming among the tents of Maudyn’s settled camp. “I daresay Your Majesty understands more of that than I do.”

“Take it for the truth! There was no going into that shadow if a man didn’t believe he could, and did, and those that went under it, died; but those that faced it never could have faced it except that cold iron and shed blood do avail something, sir, I swear they do. And I know by all the signs I see in the sky there’s more than cold iron at work against me. I’m not mad. I see the trouble among us, and I see the lords who served my father acting like fools, and believing a man who can’t charm his own peasantry into taking the field for him.”

“I don’t understand,” Maudyn said.

“Wizard-work doesn’t rule. Mauryl was Kingmaker, not a king. Emuin doesn’t rule. Wizards don’t. What they want is something more than earldoms.”

“And what is that, Your Majesty?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? What do they want? What does Emuin want?” What did Mauryl want when he sent me Tristen? That was the silent question, the one he failed to pose for Maudyn and Anwyll, the one he posed himself alone: Tristen himself was that puzzle, Tristen who could scarcely fend for himself, now at the head of the southern army.

Tristen armored in black, on a black horse, his gift, and attended by that damned bird and a flock of pigeons… what did he want?

That was one thing. What Mauryl might have wanted was another matter: Mauryl was an ally of convenience and a wizard’s evident frustration with his Sihhë allies… or that thin blood to which the line had dwindled.

To prevent this Hasufin Heltain having any success: that was the evidence of Lewenbrook. He had no illusions it was any love of the Marhanen or fear for his continuance.

And what had happened, but this damned bolt of lightning that had sent Tristen from him, by his own order.

Cevulirn had gone.

Then Nevris… and Idrys. And now he was alone, between these two, Maudyn and Anwyll, good men, both; alone, with his guards. Alone, with the lords of the north… and Ryssand.

Mauryl had sent Tristen, Emuin had received him.

And what did this conspiracy of wizards want? What had it ever wanted? Something with which Tristen would agree?

If it was the calamity of the house of Marhanen, he much doubted Tristen would consent to it.

He was aware of silence around him, silence of his companions as well as his guards.

“You wonder what I do think?”

“If it please Your Majesty to say.”

“Tasmôrden’s no wizard, but I’ll lay odds someone is, within his court, someone who doesn’t care a fig for Tasmôrden, whether he lives or dies.” Tristen’s fortified the Quinaltine, he thought to himself, with a little chill. He expects something: bloody hell, half a year ago he said there was something wrong about the place.

Aloud he said, to Maudyn and Anwyll: “And if wizards are in it, we’ve wizardry on our side. Amefel and all the company of the south is at our left hand, if only we both ride past that wedge of rock that divides us one from the other.”

“To join with Tristen, then,” Lord Maudyn said.

“To join with the south if we can. If our enemy stands back that long.” It came to him while he said it that the moment advantage shifted to one strategy or the other, wizardry would incline itself to use that advantage: if he tried to meet Tristen, then opposing wizardry would attempt to prevent him… and where it worked, men might bleed for it, in great numbers.

“And if not, Your Majesty?”

“If not…” Cefwyn looked at Anwyll, who as an undercaptain had offered not a word during all of this. “What do you think,

Captain? You’ve dealt with the Lord of Amefel, latest. What do you expect of him?”

“That he will not desert Your Majesty,” Anwyll said, and seemed to hold thoughts back, in diffidence or perhaps in knowledge of Tristen. What he held back seemed likely to exceed what he said.

“And does he remain true to us?” he asked Anwyll.

Anwyll’s gaze flashed to him, wary as a hunted creature’s.

“Does he?” He did not doubt. He refused to doubt. “I think so. I think so.” He set Danvy to a quicker pace. They passed beyond the camp, and he relayed orders to Maudyn. “Your men to hold this ground, come what may.”

“Shall we let Ryssand pass?”

There was the question, the question whether one province of Ylesuin should fight another. And that was, indeed, one answer to the challenge: set Maudyn as his rear guard, against his own troops.

“Let him pass,” Cefwyn said. “Let him have his way for now. There’ll be the day, not so long from now.”

They had passed the camp and led on, so that all the men and vehicles behind them would follow.

They were on the march and would proceed a day’s march north and west, with the blind hills to their left and a traitor at their backs.

“Ryssand can stew and fret,” he added, “but it won’t get him past the ox teams in the woods.”

CHAPTER 2

Wind tore the morning’s white clouds to ragged gray rags by noon, rain threatening but never falling. Wizardry? Crissand asked silently, with a worried look, knowing Tristen wished them fair weather, and Tristen refused to agree or disagree: whatever power willed storms to oppose his wishes seemed less mindful opposition than a negligent contrariness, a surly, preoccupied opposition in the north not even caring that it spilled into the heavens for all to see.

Worse thought, that power husbanded its self-restraint, not its strength, as if to hold back and shape its force was a greater effort than to loose it.

Emuin struggled with times and seasons and nudged, rather than commanded, his designs into the grand flow of nature. Emuin moved by knowledge and plan.

Hasufin had learned of Mauryl, before he turned to self-will and attempted to overthrow nature. Mauryl was a wizard. What he could teach was wizardry: all Mauryl’s charts, all Emuin’s, all those notes, calculations and records… that was wizardry.

This, he began to fear… this negligent, careless force… was not.

They moved through a last descent of hills toward the river, wending down a last terrace of that gray stone so frequent in the district, and then the road tended generally down a pitch that, around a hill, would bring them to the site of what they had used to call Anwyll’s camp, on the river.

They were in the district of Anas Mallorn. And of that village and of all the villages of the district, they saw occasional traces as they rode, the droppings of sheep, the stray bit of wool at the edge of a thicket, but they never caught sight of flocks or shepherds: Tristen had noticed that fact and had pondered it even before Uwen remarked on the vacancy of the land.

“Not a sheep from here to the river,” Uwen said. “So’s the shepherds has the smell o’ war, an’ ain’t havin’ their flocks for soldiers’ suppers, no. They’ve seen too much comin’ an’ goin’ of armies hereabouts in recent years.”

And Crissand, whose own lands depended primarily on the herding of sheep, nodded. “They’ll be high in the hills,” he said, lifting his eyes toward the rugged land to the east, that obdurate rock that had no easy passage except the river… and how even the Lenúalim had won its passage down to the sea was a distracting wonder.

Had the mountain split for it?

Had ancient magic made a way… or Efanor’s hitherto silent gods commanded it?

His mind even at this time of urgency hared off onto such tracks, and followed then a forbidden course, wondering how Idrys fared.

That, he would not wonder, not when he had been thinking of their enemy.

The gray space risked too much. What came and went there flitted, skipped, was there and gone again. The gray clouds that had appeared tore to wisps in the heavens and went to nothing with disquieting swiftness. The men noticed, and pointed aloft.

Not a wizard: his thoughts flew back to that uncomfortable suspicion.

Even sorcerors worked a sort of wizardry. Such had been Hasufin Heltain, such he still was, if anything still survived.

But if it was within a wizard’s ability to so disturb the weather as this, it was not possible for a wizard then to ignore it as trivial, or to change his mind and change the weather to something else.

Did Emuin know that this force existed? Had Emuin known that something this swiftly-changing opposed them, and never told him?

Mauryl had failed a contest with his own student, Hasufin, and the long-ago folk of Galasien had fallen under Hasufin’s rule for a time… until Mauryl had made the long journey north to the ice, to the Hafsandyr where the Sihhë dwelled. The tales were not, as he had heard, that Mauryl had Called the Sihhë south, but that Mauryl had gone to them to persuade them south.

And what lay there, in the frozen reaches of the mountains that Mauryl must respect, but magic: and why had only five met him, five sole occupants, as legend said, of one fortress? He could all but see those walls, black and severe against the mountains and the ice.

And where were the fields and the crops, the sheep and the people in this vision?

Had the Sihhë-lords not wives and children and homes to leave?

He could not remember. He could not gather that out of the mists of memory even with effort, whether there had been women, or children, or what had sustained the Sihhë in that frozen, high keep.

Yet Men said that he was Sihhë, and he bled, and feared, and did other things that Men did.

He did things, however, that Men and wizards did not do, and saw things they did not see, and had read the Book, and knew he had written it, though it was Barrakketh’s own hand, the first of the Sihhë-lords. It had wanted wizardry and cleverness to read that mirror-written writing… wizardry, but not all wizardry; trickery such as Men used, but not all trickery: a mirror and the light of the gray space. In that much… had not he done what any wizard could do?

Nothing was simple: wizardry and sorcery and magic commingled, and two of those three depended on times and seasons; the second was the perverted use of the first; the third was innate in those who had it—

And if wizardry had a dark mirror…

Might magic have one?

Why had Mauryl gone to the north rather than speaking to the Sihhë at a distance, as he was sure Mauryl had known how to do?

And how had he gone? By roads? And if by ordinary roads, fearing the ascendancy of his enemy, why had it taken five Sihhë-lords coming back with him to overthrow the rule of one mere student of Mauryl Gestaurien—Mauryl, whom all the Men he knew called the greatest and oldest of wizards?

What indeed had Mauryl and the five Sihhë had to face in the south?

Hasufin? The might of old Galasien arrayed against Mauryl?

“Strays is apt to end in stewpots,” Uwen was saying, regarding sheep and pigs. “Even wi’ the best of soldiers… and there’s that ragtag lot that’s come ‘mongst Aeself’s lads, who ain’t themselves come with wagons nor supply. It ain’t sayin’ there ain’t some Elwynim up in the hills even now, bands not wantin’ to join Aeself’s lot, not desirous of goin’ home, neither. The war’s gone one way an another in Elwynor, and that don’t lead all the captains to be friends of one another, nor to trust comin’ into Aeself’s camp, even if they wasn’t ever Tasmôrden’s men.”

“I don’t see any there,” Tristen murmured, for to his awareness the hills rising in the east were barren of men and sheep, the same. “The people have fled, if they were able, farther to the south. It was hungry men that came to raid Aeself’s camp, and the Lady of Emwy didn’t let them in.—But Aeself’s moved,” he said, for his awareness of the land flared dangerously wide for a moment, a lightning stroke of a wish that lit the landscape all around him. In fear he stifled that vision and made himself see the land between his horse’s ears, the road in front of him, the company on either side.

“Gods bless,” Uwen muttered. “Moved, ye say?”

“I sent Cevulirn’s men by this road,” Tristen recalled, “while we visited Aeself: I haven’t been this far toward the river since Cevulirn and I traveled this road… and all the land is empty now. The people have gone to Drusenan’s wall, or they’ve gone to the south, none toward the river, none toward the hills.”

“They wouldn’t,” Crissand said somberly. “The hills to the east are for bandits and outlaws.”

“There aren’t any of those there, now, either.”

“Taken hire wi’ Tasmôrden,” Uwen said. “There’s a sorry way’t’ clean th’ land of bandits.”

“Taken hire with Tasmôrden right along with the Aswydd servants,” Crissand said. “Every outpouring of Heryn’s court is over there, and every common cutthroat from our woods. It’s our sins that wait across the river.”

“And Elwynor’s,” Tristen said, for it seemed to him that was the case… that the timid had fled and the strong had chosen sides, the strong good men being beaten time and time again and pulled this way and that by successive claimants to the Regency, until this day, that the best men were a small band in Aeself’s hands and the worst were an army sacking Ilefínian.

“And Elwynor’s,” Crissand agreed with him, and added, a moment later: “Gods save Her Grace.”

“Amen to that,” Uwen said. “As she won’t have an easy reign when she has ‘er kingdom.”

Crissand said nothing to that. The gray space was troubled for a moment, and troubled in the way not of a wizard thinking secret thoughts, but troubled as it grew troubled when words rang wrong. And everything Uwen had said suddenly rang wrong, out of joint with what was now in motion. Crissand had not meant gods save Her Grace as a benison, only as a commiseration, as if their positions were equivalent… it seemed, suddenly and for no reason, true.

How? Tristen asked himself. How was Crissand’s state balanced with Ninévrisë’s within things-as-they-were? That they both were bereft of fathers?

—That they both were, in a sense, heirs to thrones and kingdom, but not crowned?

Therein, perhaps, the Unity of Things that wizardry so loved and through which it found its power.

Unity of Things, Unity of Direction, Unity of Time…

The three were all met, in those two. And a piece of the world as it ought to be went into place like a sword into its scabbard, a weapon ready to his hand.

But in the beginning, Mauryl had called down five Sihhë to help him, not one.

And Mauryl had overthrown the last faint trace of a Sihhë blood dilute with generations among Men, finding in the last of them, as in the first, no model of virtue.

Mauryl had set a Man in power, the Marhanen, to bridge the gap.

But in the right season, consulting the heavens, Mauryl had called him into his study, born of fire and a wizard’s wishes—Mauryl had declared him lacking, and sent him forth into the world, all the same.

What had Mauryl calculated he would be… that he had not been?

All Mauryl’s papers and parchments had fallen prey to the elements and the vagrant winds at the last. There was no record

And if he had been Barrakketh, why did it not Unfold to him what that enemy was, and what it was called, and how to defeat it? He cudgeled his mind, battered at its walls, but, seeking a name for his fears, he could think of nothing at all, it was so opposed to all he understood. He could not go near it. It was as if he could grasp it, he would inevitably contain it and be changed by it, and he could not, would not accept it within himself… nameless it remained and it would not Unfold to him.

Five Sihhë, without wives, without children… without fields or flocks: it was no kingdom such as Ylesuin: it was contained in one fortress, a gathering of those with magic inborn, having nothing to do with Galasien or Mauryl, nothing at all… except Mauryl’s appeal to magic, where wizardry went awry.

And whatever might have moved the Sihhë-lords to gather their resources and come south, abandoning all purpose but one? What lure but curiosity could move them?

Surely something greater than curiosity had drawn them south to change the world.

He tested all around the edges of that idea, to see whether there might have been more than five Sihhë, or even whether there might still be, but all that seemed in any sense to Unfold to him was a surety that five was the sum of them, that the Hafsandyr had raised a fortress against some great ill, and that there was enough of Men in the nature of the Sihhë that they had left children in the world.

But where had they gone, one by one? Had they died as Men died?

Or had they wandered across the Edge in the gray space and joined the Shadows that way, as Uleman of Elwynor had gone? Was that the darkness he recalled at the foundation of everything?

If he had ever died, the memory of death eluded him. If he had met defeat, he had never recalled it. If he had loved a woman of the race of Men, he had no memory of it. There was danger, he suspected, in slipping too far back, and remembering too much, and becoming bound to it.

Yet there was danger in not knowing, too, insofar as he had weaknesses. Of harm he had dealt with since Lewenbrook, he suspected it was Hasufin who had moved Cuthan, and Orien. It was Hasufin who had attempted to steal his way among Men, and it was surely Hasufin’s wizard-work that had moved the archivist, for more than any other thief, principally a wizard would want to know the things hinted at in Mauryl’s letters, would seek after any ragtag piece of knowledge, something that might fix only one date, one hour, to make clear all the others, and find a way into Mauryl’s workings to threaten him. Indeed, wizardry could harm him, as wizardry had Called him.

But to him, what were hours and times? To him and, he thought, to all the Sihhë, the whole of the world and the life within it flowed like a river, and moved with a sure power he felt rather than knew. What he did was no matter of charts, and plans: it was like sliding on the snow, like that glorious morning when they had come out of doors and men had gone skidding on the steps. That was the feeling he had when he tried to move the weather. So many things changed at once there was no time to ask what had changed: he simply changed more of them, until for one glorious moment he had his balance… that was what it was to work a great magic. The little changes just happened, wordlessly, soundlessly, fecklessly; he shed them as he shed raindrops, and such, he feared, was his enemy.

He knew to his regret how great a fear he had evoked in master Emuin at first meeting; he knew how he must still drive Emuin to distraction… and he deeply regretted all along having made the old man’s calculations so difficult. He had never completely understood what a trial he had been. Now he did know, and knew how brave Emuin was, and how very, very skilled, to have kept him in close rein. With all his heart he wished the old man well… wished well all the company that rode behind him, continually, as the sun beat down on them and the world went on as orderly as its folk knew how, in spite of the mischief magic might do.

And of all those near him, only Crissand was completely aware of the frantic racing of his thoughts, and did not interfere or question or pursue him, was not appalled at him—only bore him up with the wings of his selfless, reckless will. It was love that made Crissand a safe companion for him, and adoration that kept Crissand staunch and unquestioning in his tumble of thoughts and this reckless exploration of the world. And that gave him courage when his own courage faltered and when that Edge seemed all too close.

—I’m here, Crissand said, when he no more than thought of him. I don’t understand all the things you say. But I’m here.

—I’ve never doubted, Tristen said. I don’t doubt you. Nor ever shall.

So he said to Crissand as the descent continued around that long hill, and in that moment they had had their first sight of the river and of the camp to the left… such as remained. Where once rows upon rows of tents had stood on that flat expanse was now a flat scar of bare, trampled earth. Where Cevulirn and the lords of the south had camped, five tents remained in that trampled desolation, with a handful of horses.

But the bridge that Tristen had last seen as a ruin spanned the dark flood of the Lenúalim with stout timbers and the substance of Cevulirn’s good work.

“Nary a soul stirrin’,” Uwen muttered at the sight, “nor any boats in sight. Which should be good.”

Beyond any doubt of his, Cevulirn had crossed the river and set up camp on that far side, a base from which they might advance north.

But whether Idrys had found one of Sovrag’s boats to carry him east was still in question.

They left the road and set out across the bare earth toward those remaining tents, but before they had reached them a handful of Ivanim came out and stood waiting to give them all courtesies.

“Is Lord Cevulirn across the river?” was Tristen’s first question, from horseback. “And have you seen the Lord Commander?”

“Our lord and the army have their camp just the other side.” the seniormost Ivanim said cheerfully, a man with a scarred chin and gray in his hair. “And the Lord Commander’s sailed on with Sovrag’s men, upriver, on account of your word, Your Grace, as we hope did come from you.”

“It did.” Idrys was a man hard to refuse, and might have given Cevulirn himself qualms in his haste to be on eastward, but that Idrys had found passage and was on his way to Cefwyn was a vast relief.

Yet the instant he said that, and thought that Idrys was safe, an uneasy feeling still ran through the gray space, the flitting of a thought that passed him in the same way he was aware of creatures in the woods and men around him. It came to him that he had not seen Owl for some time, and that they were at an edge, of a kind, here on the river shore.

Here was where the war began, and here was where he committed himself and other men to reach Cefwyn and keep his pledge to Her Grace.

Most of all… for a moment he could not draw his breath… ahead was the reason Mauryl had called him into the world, and he was sure now as at any Unfolding that a rebellious student was not the enemy that had driven Mauryl to the Hafsandyr or the Sihhë to leave their fortress in the high mountains.

He did not detect the danger as near them, nor was it the sort of threat that would have had him order shields uncased and the warhorses saddled. But danger there was. Their camp was on the other side of the river, and what he felt urged him to move on and quickly. It Unfolded to him not as a Word or a slight illumination but as a stroke of lightning across all the heavens, the ultimate reason for all Mauryl had done.

“Good day,” he remembered to say, however, recalling Men and their courtesies and their due with the same awkwardness he had felt in Cefwyn’s court. “Thank you.”

Then he turned red Gery and rode at an easy pace toward the bridge, with Uwen and Crissand close on his heels and the company falling in behind them. The banners streamed past on the right as the bearers sought to get them to the fore just before the three of them rode onto the bridge, and when they had climbed up the slanting approach and onto the rough, newly planed logs, the horses went Warily, looking askance at the broad current of the Lenúalim and the height of the span, the like of which they had not met. The wind blew unrestrained here. The thunder of so many riders behind them, even slow-moving and deliberate, drowned the rush of the river under the wooden spans.

“Never crossed the like in m’ life,” Uwen put it, “nor’s Gia. This is a grand work, this.”

“Grand work, indeed,” Crissand said.

And at the end of the bridge, before they were halfway across: a handful of men stood forth from the woods, occupying the end of the bridge, waving to them, seeing the banners and signaling them, if they had failed to ask at the camp, that it was Lord Cevulirn’s men on the far side.

“Welcome!” they said. “Well come, indeed. Go on, go on, our lord will expect you!”

They passed from that meeting into the woods, on a road long unused until the recent passage of oxen and horses. Last year’s weeds, brown and limp from melted snows, lay trampled into the mire by shod hooves and pressed into the ruts left by cart wheels. Small brush was crushed down and broken, while the new track deviated around the occasional stout sapling that had sprung up in the old roadway, and others were hacked half through at the root, bent flat, so the carts could go over them.

And at the end of that course was the first of the gray-stone hills this side of the river, wooded and brushy and guarded by some furtive presence atop it: Tristen felt it rather than saw.

“Lanfarnessemen,” he said to Uwen, directing him with a shift of his eyes, and Uwen looked up at the nearer hill. At that, the presence ebbed away, shy as any deer: it was a danger not to them, but to their enemies.

Just beyond that stony, forested outcrop, the brush gave way to brown, grassy meadow, and there white canvas had bloomed into a sizable camp, yet a discreet one, too, a surprise to come upon just past the forest and between the hills, and warded by watchers on the heights.

And still that presence on the hill tracked them, watching not them, perhaps, but any action that might oppose them. Intruders under any strange banner would surely have met arrows flying thick and fast: Lanfarnesse rangers seldom used presence-betraying canvas—but they were there. Their Heron banner flew with the Wheel of Imor and the White Horse of Ivanor and the Wolf of Olmern in the heart of the camp, announcing the presence of Pelumer with Umanon and Cevulirn and Sovrag in this gathering… welcome sight.

A man ran ahead of them, and told an officer, and that man , hurried into the centermost tent as they rode up the aisle of this gathering of tents. Cevulirn came out with Umanon, and Pelumer came close behind, all cheerfully welcoming them in.

“His Grace’s banners wi’ the rest,” Uwen ordered the banner-bearers, and smartly then the banner-bearers dismounted and with manful efforts drove the sharp iron heels of the banners deep into the soft earth, one after the other, until the Eagle and the several standards stood with the others, the Tower Crowned and Crissand’s among them.

Tristen dismounted, and of a sudden a night without sleep and the long day in the saddle caught him unawares, sending the world to shades of gray and causing him to hold his saddle leathers a moment as his feet met the ground. He tried to wish his sight clear again, but it was as if the gray insisted, and closed around him, a chute down which it was easy to fall.

But Uwen was there, a hand to his elbow, and Cevulirn named a man to guide the Amefin to their tents, which were pitched and ready for them, and a hot meal besides, while Crissand’s voice in Tristen’s left ear assured him he would personally see to the guard.

“Go in, my lord, rest.”

“There’s no rest,” Tristen said, and drew a breath and managed to see the camp again, how it stretched off into the trees beyond, the horse pickets out under the branches, under the watchful eye of the rangers… he could not miss that presence, as he was aware of every heart that beat within the camp, the converse of men-at-arms, low and wondering at his lapse.

There was nothing so wrong with the place, Tristen said to himself; it was simply fatigue. Indeed the offer of a good meal and a rest from riding came very welcome… he might rid himself of the armor for a brief while… might sit with friends, a privilege rare in the world, and rarer still on the edge of losing everything. So much… so very much he loved; and it all seemed fragile at this moment, on the edge of the enemy’s attention.

He drew a breath. He summoned his faculties away from that brink, and steadied himself away from Uwen’s supporting hand. He gathered up the threads of things he had meant to say, and walked, and gathered strength with every step

“The Lord Commander,” he was able to say to the other lords as he ducked through the tent flap, “brought Her Grace to Henas’amef, for safety’s sake. Did he tell you why?”

“Not two words,” Cevulirn said, “except it was your bidding…”

Another presence had joined them, filling the tent door when Tristen turned about, and that was Sovrag himself.

“Aye,” the river lord said. “And all full of mystery he were, an’ if the wind hadn’t served, why, damn, he’d have driven them lads to row ‘im there. What’s toward?”

“Cefwyn’s in danger.” Words poured out of him, and he wished to sit down, but found nowhere. “One of Ryssand’s men is beside him and Cefwyn doesn’t know.”

That brought somber looks.

“Gods save the Marhanen, then,” Umanon said. “And a good wind to the Lord Commander’s sails.”

“So I wish,” Tristen said in all earnestness. “And wish it twice and three times. Ryssand’s coming to the muster, but he means no good to Cefwyn. Tasmôrden’s promised him part of Elwynor for his own if he takes the crown.”

“I should have stayed at court,” Cevulirn said. “I might have stopped this.”

Tristen shook his head. “Wizardry’s in question. It reached past all of us.”

“We can’t reach him,” Umanon said. “Gods speed the Lord Commander, indeed.”

“Aye,” came from Sovrag and Pelumer, with a nodding of heads.

“What says Amefel?” Cevulirn asked, grim-faced and with his arms folded. “If it’s to ride this hour, we’re ready.”

“I’m less and less sure I know,” Tristen said in utmost honesty, for Owl was not to be found, and had shied from him—yet he knew nothing to do but forge ahead with the plans they had. “But we have to move. There’s no time to sit here.”

“Late afternoon now, but men and horses well rested,” Cevulirn said. “We can give the order.”

“To march at night?” Umanon asked dubiously.

“To move as far up the road as we can,” Tristen said. “I can wish winds on the river, but stone is stone and the hills won’t move for us. We have to go closer. Tasmôrden surely won’t rely only on Ryssand.”

“No one should rely on Ryssand,” Pelumer said.

It was true. And it was true, after all, that the hills might move, but they were stone and sluggish things and could not change precipitately. Tristen drew in a breath, suddenly apprehending a power rising out of the land and a power rising within him, different than the weary body that housed it. He felt he could scarcely move, scarcely draw breath without breaking lives and men, and yet the ones he would strike… were not in his reach. Only friends were. A shield stretched across the north and the west, subtle, and con-raining men, but it was not men. It was their enemy Tasmôrden, but Tasmôrden was not all of it.

He felt an opposing magic, felt it slip like a step on ice, one matched against the other, and like a third lightning stroke he knew he had met the enemy, met, and slid aside, unwilling to engage.

“Ilefínian,” he said on a breath. “Ilefínian! That’s his place of power in this world, and from it he draws his strength. The closer he is to it, the stronger he will be.”

“Tasmôrden?” Pelumer asked him.

“Yes, Tasmôrden. But that’s not all.” He must sit down, or fall down, and groped blindly after the tent pole, but met instead Uwen’s arm, and Crissand’s.

“My lord,” Crissand said. “What’s wrong?”

Owl. Owl was in danger, winging through the woods, diving from left to right, through the trees, with something streaking after him, dark, and broad, and filling the woods.

“Sit, sit down, my lord.”

He obeyed, calling Owl with all his might, and Owl heard him. Owl came, through a place of blue light and rustling wings. Owl came as he had come to the hall at wintertide, and burst back into the world again. A tilted view of tents came to him, an evening sun, and he swayed where he sat, then let go the vision.

“Good lovin’ gods!” Uwen said, for Owl flew through the door in a buffet of wings, dived past Cevulirn, and hit the canvas wall in a flapping lump that slid to the floor.

Owl gathered himself immediately and fluffed his feathers into order.

A narrow escape, Tristen said to himself, and offered his arm. Owl ducked his head, gave a great flap of blunt wings, and managed to reach him, to settle on his arm, ruffling and settling his feathers.

There was silence all around. Tristen looked up at a circle of dismayed faces.

“ ‘E all right?” Uwen asked, in that deep silence of the lords of the south.

“He’s well.” Tristen stroked Owl’s breast feathers, and caught a resentful look of two marigold eyes at close range that held his gaze. He knew what Owl had fled, yet had no idea in what words to tell the rest of these men, even Uwen.

“Let him rest,” Crissand said.

“Break camp,” Tristen said. He saw Uwen’s unhappy look, saw the worry on Crissand’s face and others’. “There’s no rest here.”

“Then we break camp,” Cevulirn said. “Do as he says.” To an-other man, one of his guards, Cevulirn said, “Food and drink for all these men, and Lord Tristen, whatever we can provide until we get to horse.”

“Is it a fight comin’?” Sovrag asked, perplexed as the rest. “Give me what’ll yield to an axe, an’ I’m ready.”

“There’s a great deal that will yield to it,” Tristen assured him, and reached out for all the rest of them. “I may not ride with you all the way. I don’t know. If I can’t be there when the time comes, I set Cevulirn in charge. Our enemy won’t make the mistake with me he made at Lewenbrook. What comes won’t be just at us. It’s not one enemy.”

“Is it that one?” Cevulirn asked in dismay. “The ghost at Lewen field?”

“More than that,” Tristen said, uneasy in naming entirely what Unfolded to him, as if by never saying it he could dispell it. Yet he must say it. “It wasn’t only Hasufin who brought down Ynefel. And it wasn’t only Hasufin who drove Mauryl north to find the Sihhë-lords.” Even as he said it he saw icy mountains and a wizard much younger in those days, riding through trackless snow. He saw a great black height, and a fortress of dark stone, and a hall without servants. He felt the cold, and recalled the clean sting of the north wind on his face and the icy stone through the soles of his boots.

He had known the battlements, and all the chambers under his feet; and he had known before Mauryl came what Mauryl would say… all these things, all at once. He longed for Mauryl’s face, the word, the kindness… he watched that lonely figure leaning on the wind beneath his walls, and yearned with all his heart to give the old man at once what he had come to find.

But that was now. Then he had foreknown the quest itself, and the middle-aged wizard at his gates.

He knew the peace of the ice, and the company of his fellows. They were only five, five who bore the gift and the curse of magic, and foreknew this wizard’s seeking them.

He drew a deep, ice-edged breath, and saw through the years.

“ ‘Ere, m’lord.” Uwen had his arm.

“Ale,” Sovrag said. “The lad’s seen a haunt, is what.”

He was no longer in that place of black stone. He sat beneath a canvas roof, with canvas under him and the lords of the south serving him with their own hands. Uwen set his hands on his shoulders, saying, “Brace up, m’lord, there’s a lad, come, take a sip, take a breath.”

“I saw the Hafsandyr,” Tristen said in the breath of a voice he commanded. “I saw the Fortress of Mists.” He did not know how he knew its name, but that was the fortress the Sihhë had held in the far northern mountains, the Qenes, in the language they shared with Mauryl, far, far from Elwynor. He found Unfolding to him a host of things nameless and thoughts unthinkable in the language of Ylesuin and Elwynor, things his hand had written in that small Book he had given to the fire, the night before Lewenbrook.

As now… he recalled the north, and the black peaks crowned with ice, and the rap of a wizard’s staff against the gates.

Once.

Twice.

Magical thrice.

He ceased to breathe, and then must, and saw all the faces of his friends as strangers’ faces, perhaps enemies’ faces, even Uwen’s.

Had he known these folk? Had he foreseen them?

Then he was mortally afraid, and reached for Uwen’s hand and gripped it as Uwen gripped his, until bone ached and flesh turned white-edge. He looked into Uwen’s grizzled face and dark eyes and saw a Man, and a good man, and the one above all others whose voice could Call him.

“Speak to me,” he begged Uwen. “Say anything at all.”

“Ye’re me dear lad,” Uwen said. “An’ my lord, and I’ll have no other. Steady. Take a breath. There’s a lad.”

“I’m here,” he said, for those threads bound him to safety and let him draw breath. “I am here.”

He knew Uwen would do his best to make sense of half answers, and he fought to leave that other place, to be unequivocally in the world of Men. He wished to make Uwen at least understand, and then Uwen would tell the others.

But another hand took his arm, and a faith as clear as the morning sun shone in that face, and out of those eyes.

“My lord,” Crissand said, the aetheling, the foretold, and the long-remembered.

“I know he’ll strike at Cefwyn,” Tristen warned him. “And he’ll strike at you.”

“Tasmôrden?”

“Tasmôrden?” For a moment, the name was only sound, a sound bearing no relation to his fears, and once the name did achieve meaning, he shook his head in denial. Then on the next breath he realized: “Possibly. It’s well possible, if Hasufin had his way about it, isn’t it? Hasufin moved Tasmôrden so long as Hasufin was enough to move him. Whatever houses our enemy… it might be Tasmôrden, but more likely… more likely our enemy has no Shape in this world. Hasufin dealt with him. Hasufin brought him to Ynefel… but such Place in the world as he’s claimed now, is never far from Ilefínian. Uleman didn’t know the enemy’s presence there. He only saw the rebels that rose against him. Orien didn’t know he was speaking to her. She only heard Hasufin. I didn’t know what brought down Ynefel. I only heard the Wind, as I heard it behind Hasufin, when he killed one of the birds; I only saw the Dark, when it rolled down on Lewen field.”

“So we all saw the Dark,” Uwen said. “Gods save us, this Wind and the Dark… Is that ahead of us?”

“It may be. It may. But Hasufin is a shell for it. He’s all hollow, behind. Mauryl knew what Hasufin had listened to. That’s why he called down the Sihhë to deal with it…”

“What d’ ye say, lad?” Uwen had his hand on his shoulder, and pressed it hard, that voice, above all voices, commanding him to make clear the things he saw.

He struggled with words. But he found several. “Old. Very old. Hasufin listened to it in Galasien the way Orien listened to Hasufin in Henas’amef, with no better result.”

“Summat else, ye say.”

“Before Mauryl. Before Galasien’s towers stood.” He was aware of his gaze fixed on nothing, on darkness and deep, on the depths of Ynefel’s foundations, the work of the master Builders, and the Masons who had laid the Lines. “They weren’t content to observe the seasons, these old ones. They shaped Lines to master the Shadows, and make Seemings stand in the light of day.” It too aptly described him. He was not unaware of the irony of his struggle against this darkness that Mauryl had fought. He had ridden so far and set all this in motion, mustered all these men, and now that he was called to ride for the very purpose of Mauryl’s Summoning him, did he fall down in trembling and weakness? He was angry with himself, and afraid for the outcome for these men he loved, and took one deep breath after another until the shapes of the world came clear to his eyes, at least as far as a huddle of pale gray that hovered about him.

He clung to that sight. He sought to leave the reckoning of things insubstantial and the maze of gray that wanted his attention, and to shape that maze in substance, of lords of Men who stood for powers on the earth, and men-at-arms of flesh and bone who stood for the earthier, more common magic of hearth and fence and field.

Men ruled the earth now, and the Shadows obeyed the stones that Masons laid in rows on the land.

“I must face him,” he said, for him was as apt as any word. It thought. It moved. It wished and worked and willed, and the Qenes stood against its wishing and working. He was sure of that. The Qenes, the work of master Masons, the home of Shadows and the fortress of the Shadow-lords: there all the powers within the earth held a Line that must not be broken.

He drew a calmer breath. Shadow-lord. That was the thing he was. That was who he was. The knowledge was no blazing noon of clear understanding. It was a moonrise in a still, cold night, gathering shadows into shapes, and Shadows into power.

—Auld Syes, he said to the Queen of Shadows. Faithful lady. Cross the water. I need you. Come.

“Tasmôrden?” Crissand asked, and he realized he had lost the thread of speech. “Is it Tasmôrden you mean, my lord? Or is it something less substantial we face?”

“Tasmôrden, if we can reach him in time. And Ryssand. Ryssand will be the hands and the feet of this attack. Should Cefwyn die, the army would break apart and fight each other, Maudyn against Corswyndam and Prichwarrin, on Elwynim soil. What then could we win?” Owl spread his wings, rowed against the air, settled again on his wrist. “But others must stop Ryssand. Idrys must stop him.” And with that realization, the acknowledgment that he could not be in both places, the fatigue settled in full. “I’ll sleep an hour, until we ride. Is there a place?”

“Here.” The lords might regard him with misgivings, the one who had summoned them who now nodded like a man with too much ale, and after speaking nonsense, began to slip toward dreams. But one quiet, sure voice drew him with its slight wizard-gift, and gained his wide-wandering attention. “Rest. I’ll attend the breaking of camp.”

“Sir.” He knew the name, then, in his distance from the world: Cevulirn would watch over all that had to be done and Uwen and Crissand would care for him, and so he let the two of them draw him to his feet and guide him.

“He ain’t taken ill,” Sovrag said in troubled tones. “He ain’t fevered nor any such.”

“Tired,” Uwen said out of the gray mist in which the world of Men proceeded. “An’ hearin’ summat we don’t hear. He’s a’ready fightin’ the fight we ain’t come to, your lordship, an’ scoutin’ ahead of us, don’t take it for aught less, beggin’ your pardon.”

“Gods bless,” Umanon said solemnly, but seemed not to condemn him; and Pelumer’s presence flitted close and offered comfort and a sense of stealth that Unfolded in all its skill.

… Like Emuin, who studied at his charts in Henas’amef, in his tower… subtle, and present without even paying close attention to him. Emuin was always doing something else, but he did many things constantly. It was very hard to evade him.

Ninévrisë was a whisper in the gray space, listening, Tristen thought, and wary of what was within her, and wary of that third presence, and the fourth, and the fifth and sixth, Tar ten’s son, and Tarien, and her sister Orien pacing the Lines of her confinement, as their brother continually attempted the greater Line of the lower hall.

The Aswydds would take any alliance that opposed their confinement. They would steal Elfwyn away with them if they could: that was always a risk, for as long as Tarien lived she had that tie to him… but Elfwyn seemed protected, loved, held.

In seething confusion the living mingled with the Shadows, all through the fortress at Hen Amas. Far to the west, within the Lines of Althalen, another Power quietly knew his daughter’s presence in the land, knew, and welcomed, and waked to the growing danger of his people.

“My lord!” It was Crissand, returned from the rows of tents and men, aware of his drifting at the edge of the gray space. Crissand’s concern flared brightly in the mists. Uwen was there to caution him, however, and Cevulirn steadied him, and the flame that burned so dangerously bright slowly ebbed to a flickering candle.

There was a guide, should he need one, a guide who could fly through any confusion.

… Owl swept close, a shadow across his sky, and winged past him, directing his attention northward. Here, Owl seemed to say. This way!

And with the crack of Mauryl’s staff, he heard: Pay attention, boy!

Ilefínian… there was his battle. Owl drew him there, to where the enemy waited, urged him to leave the battle of Men to men, and abandon Cefwyn to his fate.

And in that mere wisp of an outcry against that notion Tristen knew he exposed his weakness to his enemy, and showed that enemy most clearly the way to his heart, if ever it had doubted it.

It was folly to have followed Owl here, utter, dangerous folly. He drew back from that place, to that flickering candle that was

Crissand’s presence. He refused Owl’s urging—for the first time in his presence in the world refused what his guide asked of him.

No purpose of wizards was worth Cefwyn’s life. Nothing in the world was more precious to him than that. Cefwyn had banished him, severed him from the court, but entrusted him with all that was most precious to him: never had they been closer friends than now.

And could he knowingly ignore Cefwyn’s peril? He could shake the mountains and the hills and will them to future courses… but he could not gain Cefwyn’s attention, could not warn him, could not reach him, not with magic enough to shake the earth.

Cleverness, perhaps, would serve where magic failed.

His battle was joined now, in this very moment, and now he and his enemy alike drew back to consider one another, to reason out what was the feint and what was the true intent.

And Owl urged him northward, constantly northward, as if there were no other course.

As if there were no other course.

Back! he bade Owl, and: Away! he bade all advice from wizards, even Emuin, even Mauryl’s Unfolding spell. Neither wizard had defeated the enemy. Mauryl had never seen clearly, never understood how little of Hasufin remained, how small a soul still yearned for life and worked at the edges of greater, more terrible ambition: he had had the knowledge to seek powers outside wizardry to repair the breach, but he could not himself repair what Hasufin had done.

Mauryl or Emuin singly or together could not win past what Hasufin had loosed, only delay its ascension.

Emuin would have had him learn the way of wizards, that being what Emuin understood, but, his greatest wisdom, Mauryl being Mauryl and not suffering foolishness easily… Mauryl had simply wished him to be, grow, learn… become what he could become. And that was the greatest spell of all.

He was not through. Not yet.

He knew, if he fell, Cefwyn would fall. If Cefwyn fell, it was for Emuin to steal Elfwyn away, cloak him in his subtle grayness, and carry on in whatever way he could.

And if he should fail, it was for Emuin to live as long as Mauryl, and learn what Mauryl had known, and Summon him from a second death…

—No! he heard Emuin protest, far and faintly. But from the Lady of Elwynor came a promise, a vow, a resolution that would fire the coldest heart.

“Time to move, lad,” Uwen said, touching him, which even Crissand feared to do.

He opened his eyes on both sober faces and hoped, for he dared not wish, that there be no more to Unfold to him, no more revelations of the sort that opened the Qenes to his memory, and gave his heart the chill of lasting winter.

“The others is summat afraid,” Uwen said, “seein’ how ye was overcome. They’d take better heart if ye can rouse up an’ hear a man, lad.”

“I do hear,” he said. His heart beat as if he had run Emuin’s stairs… or the height of the web of stairs in Ynefel itself. But that beat was a comfortable feeling, and that remembered fear he understood. It was the creaks in the dark and the crack of thunder in the afternoons. It was the gray wash of rain and the perfect green leaf that blew and stayed against the stone.

It was hanging perilously from the parapets of the old tower and, stark naked and without shame, viewing the limits of the world upside down.

It was riding through the gates of Henas’amef, and meeting the aetheling, the Sun King, the Lord of Noon, as he was Lord of Shadows.

And he reached out and seized Crissand’s hand in his, as he had held the aetheling once before from kneeling, as he had known—not only his friend, but his complement in the world of Men, a Man, and sighted in ways that Men knew. Crissand saw things, and had no magic in him to move the sunlit world to do as it ought… while he only learned the world of Men through others, and moving through the Lines on the earth, had the magic to overturn kingdoms.

Together… together they had a unity that only the enemy could challenge.

“That bird’s scairt the men,” Uwen said, “an’ ain’t let anybody into this tent, so’s ye know, m’lord.”

“Contrary creature.” Tristen gathered himself to his feet, and found the weariness fallen away from him, not in any natural sense of having rested. His body had become lighter than his spirit, as if one held to the other very lightly. He was aware of Owl, just outside, and aware of creatures winging their way above the road, above the forest, not far, silly, fleet birds with the sheen of violet and green and gray about them, the colors of storm and twilight.

Go! he wished them in a sudden rush of strength. Fly!

Owl would not obey him, but these would, the vain, silly tenants of the ledges. They flew, and wheeled away toward the east.

“We shan’t do what he wills,” he said to Uwen and to Crissand. “He’ll threaten Cefwyn. That’s where he’ll bring all his power to bear. So must we go there.”

“Not to Ilefínian,” Crissand interpreted him.

“Not to Ilefínian.” Of a sudden his heart was as perilously light as his body. “Let him have his Place so long as he can hold it. I know mine.”

And it was not a Place, as wizards understood a Place to be. It was the Oath he had sworn and the banner he had raised and the Men that surrounded him. Suddenly the tactics of the enemy were clear to him, to divide him from these things.

“North and east,” he said to his friends, and strode out the door of the tent as if an hour before he had not fallen fainting before them all.

CHAPTER 3

Ere’s that pesky bird!” Uwen exclaimed as a shadow passed them, and, indeed, Owl glided past, a petulant, difficult Owl, who had flown behind them and now was ahead, and off to the right hand again, off toward the hills, granting them only a brief sight of him.

So Tristen’s own thoughts ranged out and abroad, following Owl for a time, searching the near woods. Owl was put out with him, perhaps, after he had refused Owl’s leading, yet Owl still guided him, still spied out the territory ahead… Mauryl’s, Tristen was convinced, a wisp of the Ynefel that had been, still bespelled and hard to catch and hold: direction, to urge him toward one purpose.

But he did not need Owl to move him forward, did not need Owl to extend his awareness in the world. He felt every small watcher and every bird aloft as if they brushed against him, and was reassured to feel that there was no hostile presence broken out in their immediate vicinity.

He thought he knew now where Cefwyn was, as the wedge of hills drove toward Ilefínian: he was to the east behind that stone barrier.

More, he knew where the enemy was, and knew with more and more certainty that the attack would come not at his magic-defended force… but at Cefwyn. If only Cefwyn would hold back and let him come at Ilefínian and deal with this threat as he could, but no, the Guelen lords must have their honor… and Cefwyn was deaf to magic as to wizardry, Cefwyn had sent away his one advisor who knew a wizard-sending when she heard it and knew when to regard what Uwen called premonitions. There might be others with minor gifts that might at least feel the currents of the gray space and mutter to their comrades in arms that they had this or that worry, but the question was whether their lords would believe… whether Cefwyn would if they brought their premonitions to him. It lent a Man a certain peace of mind, Tristen supposed, to ride through threats and terrors unhearing: it even lent a man a certain real protection, for he could not hear temptation and bad advice to be swayed by it, but it was no protection at all when power reached out with tangible results and brought down the lightning.

So it was his to make what speed his force could, without tents, the wagons left behind at the camp with a garrison of Imorim, Olmernmen, and a dozen Lanfarnesse rangers, men set to assure they had a bridge open if they needed to retreat. That was prudence, for the sake of the men he led, if matters went utterly wrong. Some might make it home.

But for the rest, down to the Imorim, even Umanon had resolved to bring his men along Ivanim-style, each man with his warhorse and his relief mount, his shieldman and packhorses, each man with his own supplies: beyond the habits of Guelenfolk: they came with only muted complaint, learning new ways, foraging in the meadows at their rests, making progress through woodland with their heavy horses and heavy armor faster than any heavy horse company had ever moved, so Umanon swore in his pride in them.

So Tristen rode, and so did Uwen, both of them armed after the Guelen fashion, in brigandine and plate. Dys and Cass, who were accustomed either to their paddocks or their exercises of war, were not accustomed to a long journey under saddle, and after their first burst of anticipation and high spirits, sulked along the brush-encroached road, the same as the Imorim horses. Owl’s swooping appearances invariably drew a sharp lift of both massive heads, a flare of nostrils and a bunching of muscle, but Dys would give a disgruntled snort and Cass another, learning to disparage the sudden apparition out of the trees.

In the same way Crissand and his guard and the Amefin Guard, lighter-armed, rode sturdy crossbreds of Petelly’s stamp, while the Ivanim light cavalry, near the rear, fretted at a far slower gait than their hot-blooded horses were accustomed to keep. With them, sore and swearing, rode Sovrag and his handful of house guard, armed with axes—intending to turn infantry the instant a fight was likely, and sore, limping at every rest: they endured, being no woodsmen, either, and accustomed to a deck underfoot, not an overgrown road, and not a saddle. The Lanfarnessemen, however, moved as they always did, which was to say no one saw them at all. Lord Pelumer, who rode a white horse among his light-mounted house guard, said they were both ahead and behind the column… out as far as the hills and as far south as the river and across it.

On that account no one, Pelumer swore, would surprise the column on the way, and because of them Tristen himself dared reach out a little farther than he might have dared: Pelumer’s men were indeed within his awareness when he did so, furtive and quiet as the wild creatures of the woods, the badger and his like, who also knew their passage and themselves served as sentinels.

Their enemy waited, that was the impression he gathered, the breathlessness before storm, but to an unwary venturer there might appear nothing at all opposing them. And it hid something, he was not sure what: it hid something as Emuin could hide things, by creating a fuss elsewhere, by simply being silent.

That was the subtlety of what they faced: for as he apprehended now it was magic they faced, he could only think it was something like himself, whether cloaked in flesh or not… and increasingly, thinking of Orien’s example, he asked himself how Hasufin had turned from Mauryl’s student to Mauryl’s bitter enemy.

He had met Hasufin. He had driven Hasufin in retreat, not without cost, but not so that he feared him in any second encounter. He had seen all his tricks, dismantled his wards, and of Hasufin he was not afraid.

Of what he had suspected in the Quinaltine… of that, he had been afraid.

Of what nameless fear had chased him through the mews, he had been afraid.

Of the wind at his windows, he had been afraid, the insidious Wind, against which he had warded the windows of the Zeide, as Mauryl had warded his, at Ynefel, warning him to be under the roof when darkness fell, when storm raged, when the wind blew.

It was not of rain and wind that a wizard of Mauryl’s sort needed be afraid.

All along it had been something else whispering at night against the shutters.

And it was even possible Mauryl had not known what to call it, except as it turned Hasufin against him, and took his teachings and turned them, and took Hasufin’s heart. Mauryl might not have known all he faced, but his remedy, to bring Galasien down, to bring down the Lines… and to invoke magic from the north…

More, to gain that help, which he did not think had come to everyone who sought it…

… to bring down the walls and the wards and the Lines, so that nothing of any great age persisted in the world… what did Mauryl think to do?

What were the faces in the walls of Ynefel but a sort of Shadow, bound to the Lines and the wards, protecting what became a fortress, from which Barrakketh had ruled… had redrawn its Lines, made them to stand against all its enemies… but not everything had Barrakketh redrawn. He had laid down the Lines of Althalen, built the Wall at Modeyneth.

But Men called the Quinaltine hill their own, and defended it, war after war, until a great fortress grew there, and all those Shadows went into the earth.

He drew a great breath. For a moment to his eyes he could see Ynefel as it had been. He could see the land as it had been when there was no Ylesuin and when Elwynor’s name was Meliseriedd, and a chill breathed over his nape.

He led Men not all of whom were deaf: Cevulirn and Crissand were very close to him no matter where they rode, the one half their column distant and the other at his very knee, no difference at all. They maintained a quiet, wary presence, learning, but not, perhaps, apprehending all he feared. They were in the greatest danger, and it wrung his heart that he could find no words that would both tell them and restrain them from the curiosity that would plunge them over the brink into a fight they could not win.

All the friends he loved and most regarded were in danger. Every one of them was in danger of his life; but the wizard-gifted went in peril of their souls and their honor… and for them he was increasingly afraid.

Go back now, he might say; and he might try to face it alone. He might survive. He might drive it in retreat.

But to take this army back left Cefwyn with no help against the Men that had joined this Shadow of magic, and collectively, if they did not fight the Shadow and win, then none of them would wish to see the rule that presence would impose. He was the only barrier against the attention it wished to pay the world: Mauryl and the Sihhë-lords had stood against it as long as anyone remembered, and now he did, and he knew now beyond a doubt that this contest was for his life and its existence.

And oh, he loved this life, as he loved these men, as he loved the world and he would not yield it while there was any will left him, but when the battle came, he knew how far it would take him. Knowing how thin the curtain was that divided the gray space from the world, and on how thin a thread the present order of time itself was strung, he cherished the voices around him and the creature under him. Knowing everything could ravel and fly away from his grasp, he savored every scent in the air he breathed, from the damp forest earth to the smell of horses and leather and oiled metal, the scent of the woods and the meadows as they woke, waterlogged and cold, from winter. He found wonder in the light on Dys’ black hide and on the bare boughs of the trees. He looked out at the subtle grays and browns of the forest, finding shades as subtle as a wren’s wing and evergreen dark and stubborn at the woods’ edge—and there, oh, like a remembrance of summer, an unlovely sapling had half-broken buds.

Everything he loved was around him and he loved all he saw, the kiss of a chill breeze and the warmth and glitter of a noon sun, the harsh voices of soldiers at their midday rest, the soft sound of a horse greeting its master, the voices of friends and the laughter of men who knew the same as he did that these days of march together might be all that remained to them in the world.

One heart was not enough to hold it all. It overflowed. It required several. It required sharing. He pointed out a squirrel on a limb, and Uwen and Crissand, as different as men ever could be, both smiled at its antics. He heard Cevulirn and Umanon and Sovrag talk together as if they had always been good neighbors; and Pelumer joined them, doubtless to tell them how things had been before they all were born. Strange, he thought, to hold so many years in memory: it was strange enough to him to hold a single year and know that, indeed, he had lived into the next, and found new things still to meet.

He enjoyed the taste of cold rations and plain water, for in the dark whence he had come there was nothing at all, and he might go back into that dark again without warning, for the world was stretched so thin and fine the enemy might rupture it, as he might, unwittingly rending what was and what might be. In the gray space, time itself was not fixed: nothing was fixed or sure: he had been in the mews. He had held a boy’s hand, and carried out a newborn. He had slept in Marna Wood, and felt a presence coming through the woods, which was his own.

He adjusted a buckle at his shoulder with particular concentration, thinking he could not leave things until a further moment, and the closer he moved to Ilefínian, the more he could not trust the next moment to remain stable and fixed… though he willed it: he willed it with all the magic he could command. Every glance at the woods was a spell, every breath a conjuration.

“Ye’re uncommon quiet, the both of ye,” Uwen said, as if he had taken Crissand, too, in his charge. “Not a word to say?”

“None,” Crissand said with a small, brave laugh. “I was thinking about the lambing.”

“M’lord’ll like the lambs,” Uwen said. “Havin’ not seen any but half-grown.”

“I look forward to it,” Tristen said. He clung to Uwen’s voice as to life itself: for if all in his thoughts was gray and uncertain, Uwen’s voice gave him back the solidity of earth, the rough detail of a gray-stubbled face, the imperfect beauty of eyes lined with long exposure to the world’s bright suns. Uwen made him think of lambs, which he imagined as like half-grown sheep, but smaller… but that might not be so, thinking of Tarien’s baby, and how little Elfwyn looked like a grown man.

It was spring. The world still held miracles. The forest around him did. About them he wove his spells.

Desperately he asked, with a glance aside, “What tree is that?”

“Hawthorn,” Uwen said.

Hawthorn, ash and oak, wild blackberry and wild currant. Everything had a name and kept its separate nature. With all the flux in the gray space, the earth stayed faithful and solid under him, and the buds on the trees held an event yet to come, the promise of leaves, and summer yet unseen, precious promise, full of its own magic, an incorruptible order of events.

He embraced it, held it, bound himself to it with a fervor of love.

“There’s blooms to come,” Uwen said. “These little scraggly ‘uns’ll surprise ye, how they shine. Ye don’t see ‘em all summer when the great old oaks is leafed. Then you just curse ‘em for bein’ brush in your way, but they’ll bloom to theirselves come the first warm days an’ be pretty as maids at festival. Same’s the blackberry vines, as ain’t pleasant to ride into, or to catch your feet if ye’re chasin’ some stray sheep, but they dress fine for spring an’ give ye a fine treat in the summer… ain’t never complained about ‘em, meself, if the thorns catch me unawares. As I was a boy, I knew all the patches ‘twixt my house an’ the hills, an’ me mum’d bake up cakes… ain’t had the same, since.”

“I know a few patches,” Crissand said. “I’ll have my folk send you some.”

“Oh, but ye have to pick ‘em yourself, Your Grace, and eat a few as they’re warm in the sun.”

“Then I’ll show you where they are,” Crissand said, and the earl of Meiden and the captain of Amefel made their plans, as they said, to go blackberrying in the country, so only half the berries might reach the kitchen.

Their idle chatter, their plans—they held promises and order, too, and Tristen wished with all his heart to go with them and taste the blackberries.

And about that thought, tenacious as the vines, he feared he had begun to weave a more perilous magic: he had thought of the three of them together, after the battle that was to come, and he had wished, and that wish coming from his heart had as much power as he had bound between himself and the earth. The more he decided not to wish that day to come, the more easily it might not, and the more easily one or all of them might perish beforehand.

Bind Crissand and Uwen’s fate to his, for good or for ill, and set the integrity of the world at issue in that simple, homely wish of friends to eat blackberries… dared he? Had he done such a fatal, reckless thing?

That was the peril and the strength of Sihhë magic, that it worked so easily, and fear of what he had done sent him to the threshold of a tortuous course of half-doing and half-undoing that Emuin himself could not riddle out, Emuin who labored over his wizard-work and consulted charts and stars and seasons to which he himself was not bound. The plain fact was that he could wish it, and halfway in and halfway out was an untenably dangerous position.

Flesh as well as spirit, had not Mauryl said it? He was both.

“I wish it,” he said suddenly, aloud and with all his heart. “Pray to the gods, if they hear you: we may need it!”

“My lord?” Crissand asked, alarmed, but Uwen, who was a plain Man, said, quietly:

“M’lord’s worked a magic, an’ wants help in it; and if prayer’ll do it, why, I’ll dust mine off and do my best, m’lord, that I will.”

So they rode, after that, sometimes silent, sometimes in converse, talking on things that, like the blackberries, assumed an unaccustomed seriousness.

In this, perhaps Uwen even more than Crissand and Cevulirn understood how grave the crisis had been in him, and how dangerous the choice he had made. Cevulirn rode up the column to join them a time, not a talkative man on a day less fraught with consequence, and now seeming content to be near them, a presence at the edge of the gray space, as they were to him… perhaps after all Cevulirn had felt more of what happened than seemed likely, and offered his strength, such as it was. They had become friends, beyond that meeting Auld Syes’ had foretold; and friendship was its own reason now, three of them, their touch at each other in the gray space as solid as their sight of each other in the world, with Uwen to support them all.

“Getting dark,” Crissand remarked. “We may have to camp in this wood.”

Tristen shook his head, for he had the sense of a place farther on, where water ran, where one of Pelumer’s men waited. He hoped so, for as they passed into the wood beyond a small ruined wall, shadows ran like ink deep among the trees, and the wood grew colder, the branches seeming to rattle without a wind.

“Shall we stop?” Uwen asked.

“No,” he said. “Half an hour more.”

A glance upward through bare branches gave the only proof day still lingered, and conversations grew quieter, until there was only the crack of dry branches, the scuff of hooves on old leaves, the steady creak of leather. Shadows began to move and flow, Shadows indeed, Tristen thought, and caught Crissand’s sudden turn to try to see one. Cevulirn, too, looked askance, and Uwen took alarm from them.

“Nothing harmful to us,” he said, though he was less than sure, wary lest the Shadows turn prankish or become more aware of them than they were. As it was, they tended to be harmless: but he reminded himself it was not Amefel, and these were not Shadows he had met before. He had no idea to what authority they did answer, or whether they had any dealings with Ynefel, to the south… or worse.

Something else, a wisp of something, begged his attention, but was gone when he tried to ask what, and it seemed to him that neither Crissand nor Cevulirn had noticed it. He almost thought it was Ninévrisë, and that thought greatly worried him, as if something might have gone amiss at Henas’amef, something he dared not pursue. He had to trust Emuin for that: he had to remind himself he could not be everywhere, informed on everything at once.

So they rode a moment more in the silence that followed; but now the trees were thinning to a last curtain of scrub before a meadow, and they crossed a rill that wended its way through the last of them, not to a soggy water-meadow as they had found at their last rest, but by the last of the light, onto grassy dry ground.

And there one of the Lanfarnesse rangers sat waiting on a flat rock, expecting them, having spied out this place.

“Safety for the night,” Pelumer rode up to declare, and so it seemed, under the fair evening sky, under the first stars. So Tristen felt some of his fear depart.

But he cast a glance back at the dark wall of the wood. Strange territory in every sense, and strange musings lurked under those bare branches: Owl had not joined him, and he was anxious, still ahorse, while men waited, looking to him to dismount first.

He settled the reins and stepped down from Dys’ tall back, landed squarely and looked back a second time, as if he could surprise a Shadow, or Owl, watching him.

“Is something amiss?” Crissand asked.

He shook his head. “Disturbed,” he said, and the truth came to him as he began to speak it. “Troubled, but not against us. Still, better here, than among the trees. Better to be who we are. Tasmôrden’s men would fare very badly here, if they came.”

“They haven’t,” Cevulirn observed.

“They have not,” Tristen said, but with a sudden dread. It was suddenly sure in his heart that indeed Tasmôrden had moved from where he had last felt his presence, that the main force of the enemy army had moved the other direction from Ilefínian, away from him. That conviction lent a chill to the evening wind, one that made him gather his cloak about him, and wish Cefwyn every protection he could offer.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked, distracting him. And he felt now pulled in two directions at once, one the desire to bid them all ride on— that was folly: they would defeat themselves if they wore themselves with a further march. And he wished to go back into the woods and learn what moved there, but that, too, was folly. They were well out of it, and lucky, Uwen would say, because with the sinking of the sun, the Shadows gathered in this land to which they were strangers and intruders, and he wished safety on the rangers, that they, too, might go against their habit and come into the camp tonight.

By twilight the carts creaked and squealed their way about the weedy meadow on the lines of a camp in formation, dumping off tents as they went. Tents already distributed went up like white mushrooms at the edge of an unculled, brush-choked wood in the fading light. Groups of men dug bare earth patches for campfires… not for every man, in this overgrown area, but sufficient: Cefwyn had no wish to burn the wood down to give notice of his presence, but there was no persuading Guelenmen to camp like the Lanfarnesse rangers, and fight on cold rations, either. And there was no concealing the approach of an army that moved with carts. But not every man had a tent tonight, and fewer would have them on the following night. They shed canvas like a snake its skin, and hereafter trusted a handful of carts with the most essential supplies, but every man would carry dry rations, and every man had a good woollen cloak, the king’s gift, that was blanket, litter for the wounded, and windbreak at need. The Guelen book of war insisted the baggage was everything, and that if they lost their heavy gear, the army was doomed; but Guelenfolk nowadays were no longer invaders far from home, and he saw how even his grandfather had relied on old wisdom. Tristen urged otherwise, their feckless lord of shadows and cobwebs, as Idrys had been wont to call him: but not feckless on the battlefield, far from it, and not feckless now, leading an army northward in support of him. Tristen had spoken against carts and baggage and a long wait until spring; and he had gone instead on his own advice, to the very brink.

Now that things went astray it was Tristen’s advice that guided him, and it was huntsman’s economy he meant to practice: that was how he explained it to lords who had never ridden Ivanim fashion to war. Maudyn was dismayed to hear he meant to abandon the careful fortifications he had made, and worse, to make every individual man responsible for his own food and warmth hereafter. All day long the line of carts on a narrow, perilously forested road had kept Ryssand at his tail, for Ryssand had not been able to maneuver past.

Ryssand had surely taken the point, for Ryssand had not sent so much as a messenger forward to hack his way through the brush and seek converse with his king. The carts having gotten onto the bridge ahead of Ryssand’s forces, and the army having moved past Lord Maudyn’s camp without stopping, and some of those carts having maneuvered into the road, why, there they were, all day long, moving through wooded land well suited for scattered ambush by archers, but utterly safe from large movements of cavalry such as Tasmôrden commanded. If an army of fools was bound to quarrel in enemy territory, it was an area as forgiving of folly as he could hope for… for this one day.

After this, dissent became deadly, but he did not count on Ryssand to care overmuch. He did hope to make as much of a fool of Ryssand as he could manage, and be sure the others that might follow his leadership at least knew how recklessly Ryssand conducted himself.

Now the last contingents arrived: now Ryssand came, with, indeed, Murandys and Nelefreissan. So the banners declared, as contingent marched in from the wood-girt, well-manured road.

It was the first look he had had at Ryssand’s forces, and to his mild surprise, indeed, they all came with more than their household guards: they brought all the peasant muster he had once asked for and which he had now as lief not have trammeling up his battle plan… and with those men, they could not keep up with the cavalry as he meant to press them.

Nor could the Ryssandish peasantry avoid heavy losses in what he was sure their lord meant to do, a certainty that drove all vestige of humor from the situation. There were dead men, very likely not even in Ryssand’s concern. There were men about to make their wives widows and their children orphans and their farms a fallow waste.

Damn, he said to himself, seeing the trap of his own making. Here were men that should have been left in camp: here were men who should not have advanced farther than Maudyn’s first camp, and who certainly should not march from this one. Here were the innocent, no matter that they were Ryssand’s. It was Ryssand and Ryssand’s house guard on whom he looked blackly, and beyond them, indeed, Ryssand’s own baggage train would come hindmost of all: clearly, once it had become a race for the bridge, the traditional force Ryssand commanded had not a chance of crossing in time, not without deserting his infantry.

So Cefwyn stood with arms folded and his guard around him, under the red-and-gold Dragon Banner of the Marhanen. Lord Mau-dyn, too, came from the edge of his notice and joined him, leaving his sons to deal with the camp-making. He was touched by that sensible loyalty, not disappointed in Maudyn’s common sense to see a situation and act, no matter how strange his king’s orders throughout the day.

But, gods, he missed Idrys in what would ensue in the next few moments. He wished Idrys could have the satisfaction, for one thing, and missed that wry, acerbic, and critical counsel that reasonable men learned to respect.

Idrys was not here to impose his chilling presence, and so he met these would-be traitors not with his accustomed smile but with Idrys’ own black stare.

“Late!” he said, before Ryssand could get a single, carping word out of his mouth. “Late, and out of the order of the camp!”

“Surely Your Majesty knew we would not fail your orders,” Ryssand countered.

“Did I? Am I a wizard? I think not!” Cefwyn spared a glance at Prichwarrin and the lord of Nelefreissan, and settled a second, baleful stare on Ryssand. “On the other hand, wizards advise Tasmôrden!

Does Cuthan, perchance, give you their advice? Have you brought him? We can begin our war with a hanging. That for a start!”

“Your Majesty.” Murandys’ dismay at this wide-ranging attack was no pretense, Cefwyn was sure: Prichwarrin was too cautious a man and Ryssand too grossly affronted to say what he would wish to say. It was too early for them to launch a rebellion; it was possible that Prichwarrin himself was ignorant of what Ryssand planned and Ryssand might not want him to know it. And by the gods he was of no disposition to smooth rebels’ feathers.

“Have you brought him?” he repeated his question regarding Cuthan, and used his grandfather’s temper, nothing held back. “Parsynan, perhaps, the hero of Amefel. Do I see him in your train?”

“No, Your Majesty,” Ryssand said in cold formality.

“A pity,” he said with sudden and equal coldness. “Set your tents in what space you can find tonight. I trust after this debacle there’ll be no tardiness on the field.”

That, imprudently, perhaps, he sent straight to the heart of Ryssand’s intentions, but Ryssand never blanched.

“No, Your Majesty.”

On that, Cefwyn began to turn away, allowing them time to show their real expressions, and suddenly spun about and measured one after the other sour face with a long stare, ending with Ryssand, at whom he gazed a long, long moment.

Then he said in unfeigned disgust: “I need you. Have I your observance of your oaths?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Ryssand said for all the others, with never a blink or a glance down in shame, but Ryssand’s eyes burned.

“Heavy horse to the center,” he said. “Your infantry to guard the camp.”

“Your Majesty,—”

“To guard the camp, I say! And your horse to the center! I’ve a notion where I’ll meet that blackguard, if I can rely on my maps… if you have better, provide them.”

“I’ve received no such information, Your Majesty. Nor have any of us, save from Cuthan, of course, in whom Your Majesty has no confidence.”

Damn you, he very nearly said. The effrontery was at the surface now, the other barons standing well behind, obscure in the twilight, perhaps asking themselves how far indeed Ryssand was prepared to go. Corswyndam’s temper had almost leapt into flame. It smoldered, it very clearly smoldered. So did his.

But they were neither of them utter fools.

“Then expect an encounter tomorrow or the next day,” Cefwyn said shortly, “depending on Tasmôrden’s speed on his own roads. Have your men in order. No drunkenness in the ranks tonight, and early to break camp tomorrow. Here’s the redemption of our differences, sir. Make me your friend. I can be courted.”

“Your Majesty.” Three heads bowed. Three lords backed as if they were in the throne room, despite the informality of a martial camp, and withdrew to their own counsel.

He remained with Lord Maudyn and with his bodyguards and Panys’, and told himself he had been laudably calm throughout the encounter, remarkably cold-blooded. Now he found tremors of anger running through his limbs and asked himself whether he should order Ryssand’s arrest and execution tonight.

It might bring Nelefreissan and Murandys into line. It might be the prudent thing. He might survive the action, and Ylesuin might.

Or might not. Dared he do that, and then lead the army into battle with questions unanswered and regional angers broken wide open? He could not answer what Murandys and Nelefreissan might do… and that might rest on how much evidence they feared might come to light if he came home again. He had no idea, that was the difficulty.

March home again to settle matters, his war unfought and Tas-morden glorying in a temporary victory… that was a mouthful he could not swallow. Ylesuin had not wanted his war, but Ylesuin would come asunder in regional and religious bickering. Ryssand had his supporters among the clergy even yet, and as yet he could prove nothing of his charges against the man but his illicit traffic with Parsynan and the fact he had lodged Cuthan and taken messages from Tasmôrden. Both offended the king’s law, but the fact that Cuthan had betrayed his brother lords in Amefel was nothing at all to Guelenfolk, who detested the Amefin.

But if Ryssand died, he had, gods help him, Artisane, and whatever man besides his brother he found to sacrifice to that marriage: if Ryssand was a brigand, Artisane was a lying baggage who with a duchess’ title would lie louder and with more credible virulence.

Two heads at the Guelesfort gate might bring a wholesome silence, vacate the duchy, and take the consequences of unrest and claimants to vacant lands.

And for a moment Ryssand’s life trembled on the knife’s edge of his temper. But it was wise to consider who would stand with him: Osanan, who had joined them, had been Ryssand’s man in most questions: the lord of Osanan had always inclined himself that way in matters of regional import, the questions of fishing rights and the doctrinist Quinaltines. Where would Osanan stand if he killed Ryssand?

Or would Osanan and many another simply lack enthusiasm to advance in the battle, and retreat at the first reverse on the field? Every man for himself it would be if that sentiment took hold in various units.

Sulriggan? The lord of Llymaryn was no hero. If the army began to break, Sulriggan would trample the foremost riding to the head of the pack, and take his men with him.

Maudyn would stand. Panys. And the Guard.

No. He had laid his plans during this long day’s ride, he had settled what he would do with Ryssand, even how he would shape the battle so that units like Osanan could make their choice and units like Panys and the Dragons and Guelens would have their honor.

Let Ryssand fold or hold, as he planned matters: the outcome would be the same. And they would still push Tasmôrden back to Ilefínian, with Tristen, he fondly hoped, coming from the other leg of the triangle, to catch Tasmôrden from the other side—the last of the pretenders to the Regency, with an army large only because it was the scourings and the survivors of the long struggle. Honest men had taken to the hills. Bandits took Tasmôrden’s hire. And if they pressed Tasmôrden back and if the Elwynim saw Ninévrisë’s standard, Tasmôrden would find no support among the commons. It was Ninévrisë’s hope and it was his, that one defeat would shatter the pretender’s army and honest Elwynim would rise out of the thickets and the hills.

Trust Tristen, that if wizardry could arrange it, Tristen would be there, where he needed him, no blame, no recrimination: Tristen was coming, with Cevulirn and Pelumer and all the south, where he should have placed his trust from the beginning.

And of all unexpected things, a flight of birds soared above the wood’s edge and turned.

Pigeons, for the gods’ good sake! Pigeons. He stared after them amazed.

When did pigeons become forest-dwellers? They were not. They never had been, not these birds.

Tristen was there, he was surely there, just the other side of this cursed ridge.

Captain Gwywyn, of the Prince’s Guard, and in Idrys’ absence over the Dragons and the Guelens as well, approached him from the side, bringing a practical and immediate question. “The west for the latest to camp, Your Majesty?”

“The west and north,” he said, for there was room in the meadow on that side, and while the petty notion occurred to him to move the horse pickets on the east and let Ryssand and his allies pitch on that soiled ground, the same as they had marched on it all day, the peasant levies did not deserve it, and he did not indulge the whim. “I’ll cool my anger. Bid them join us at supper.”

“As Your Majesty wishes.”

“Advise all the lords to join us at supper. We’ll settle our marching order. Hereafter we have the enemy to quarrel with, not each other.”

Gwywyn went aside on his mission. Lord Maudyn, who had walked with him, gave him a questioning look and a blunt question: “Will Your Majesty inform Ryssand of all the plans?”

“We have to stand on the same battlefield and face the same enemy,” Cefwyn said with a sigh. “We’ll leave no lord out of our councils. I’ve no wish to expose the men afoot to risk of their lives: gods know they’re not at fault, and I’ll not face the widows.” He walked a few steps farther in the lord of Panys’ company. “But you and I have somewhat to say together. Perhaps we won’t tell Ryssand everything.”

“I would be easier in my sleep,” Maudyn said, “if Ryssand knew less.”

“I’m very sure,” he said. “To tell you the very truth, I have more doubt of Prichwarrin’s courage to defy me than I have of Ryssand’s, and that alone frets me: I don’t know what the man may do. Ryssand, on the other hand, has courage; but he doesn’t give a damn for his servants, his staff, his men, or his horses, not when he sees what he wants. His sworn men and his peasants have no worth, save as they serve him: I pity them. He doesn’t, and no few will die.”

“Then I pray Your Majesty arrest him. Others stand with the Crown. No honorable man could misunderstand.”

It was exceedingly comforting to hear Maudyn say so, and he wished he knew it was true. It was almost like hearing Idrys’ voice saying: kill Ryssand.

And when he recalled how often and why he had denied Idrys that satisfaction, he became quite clear in his own thoughts.

“No,” he said. “No, my dear friend. Much as I wish it… much as I regard your advice and your wisdom… no. Let him at least do what we accuse him of. Let it be clear beyond even Murandys’

ability to find excuses. They think him simply clever at going to the brink. I know how far he’ll go, but they don’t believe it yet.”

“Stand by and let him bring a sword against my king’s back?”

“That’s not what I expect of him.”

“What, then?”

“Oh, he’ll run—and not he, no, never say Ryssand bolted. Some unnamed man of his will turn and start a panic, and the officers will turn and the company will run, leaving the peasants to face Tasmôrden’s heavy horse and leaving the rest of us to the slaughter. And if it’s found out later, blame will fall on some poor wretch of a lieutenant, but mark me! Ryssand deals with Tasmôrden, makes a treaty, and marches home with clean hands. Therefore I set him in the center. Remember I said so beforehand, and report it in the court later, but say not a word of this even to your sons. I fear I can’t help Ryssand’s peasants. But the rest I can deal with.”

Maudyn gave him a look of intense distress. “Surely—”

“He’ll retreat. We’ll advance,” Cefwyn said. “Trust in me, sir. And hell take Ryssand.”

Owl called, in the world, and Tristen opened his eyes on stars above him, aware of Uwen sleeping on one side, aware of Crissand not so far away with his household guard and the Amefins all around: aware of the Amefin, the Ivanim, the Olmernmen, and the Imorim, with a handful of Pelumer’s rangers tucked away to the side, in their own group.

That awareness went on to all the camp and the lay of the land. Horses slept. Almost all the camp slept.

But the woods did not.

A second time Owl called. And Tristen gathered himself to his feet, feeling the stir of a wind out of the woods, a wind that smelled of rain and green things, a wind that rushed at him and blew and blew, and yet Men slept. Uwen slept. Only Crissand and Cevulirn waked, and roused to their feet as well, seeking shields and swords and helms, for they had simply loosed buckles and slept in their armor.

So indeed Tristen had done, but what he perceived was not a threat that would stop at leather and metal, nothing a shield could turn: Shadows moved in the woods, and with a thought of that Elwynim force left dead in the snow near Althalen, he felt the hair rise at the nape of his neck: he would not fall to it, but he was determined his friends would not perish: Uwen would not perish, nor would the men who came here trusting him.

The horses grew uneasy: to have them break the picket lines was a disaster they could not afford, either: the beasts smelled danger, but except for the three of them, and a slight stirring here and thefe across the camp, no man roused out of sleep.

Peace, he wished the Shadows, and was instantly confident they heard him, instantly reassured, for out of the wood came a whisk of wind that flattened the meadow grass in the starlight, and there skipped a child, blithe and happy and as perilous as edged iron. She skipped and she played in the starlight, and beyond her, around her, came other streaks in the grass, and other children that laughed with high, thin voices, distant and echoing as in some far and vacant hall.

Seddiwy, he named her, and looked for her mother in the shadows.

So Auld Syes came, a white-haired woman as he had first seen her, in homespun and fringed shawl, like any grandmother of the town; and as he had first seen her, the shadow-shapes of peasant folk came following her, the inhabitants of some village, he took them to be, but dim even for starlight.

Then he recognized an old man, and another, a lame youth, and a chill came over him, for they were the folk of Emwy village, dead since summer, young and old.

“Auld Syes,” he said to the old woman, and in the next blink saw banners among the trees, a sight that alarmed him for an instant, but Auld Syes turned in slow grace and held out a hand toward those that came. It was the Regent’s banner, and the men with it were Shadows as that banner was a Shadow itself.

It was Earl Haurydd, who had died facing Aséyneddin at Emwy Bridge, Ninévrisë’s man, and her father’s; and with him were others of that company.

And there was Hawith, one of Cefwyn’s men, killed at Emwy, and there… there was Denyn Kei’s-son, the Olmern youth who had stood guard at Cefwyn’s door, Erion Netha’s young enemy turned friend.

He saw his own banner, the Tower and Star, and the shadowy youth bearing it, and felt the deep upwelling of loss, for it was Andas Andas-son, who had joined him so briefly to carry that banner at Lewenbrook. The dark had rolled over the boy, and he had gone bravely into it, and never out again.

He trembled at the sight, he, who was no stranger to Shadows, but it was not fear that shook him, rather that he felt his heart torn to the point of pain. It was not harm the Shadows brought with them, but their loyalty, their fidelity, faith kept to the uttermost.

“My lord,” Crissand whispered, having moved close to him, and Cevulirn arrived at his other hand.

“I know them,” Tristen said. “I know them all.”

But it was not the end of visitations, and at the next the brush rattled and moved to the presence of living men, and a handful of peasant villagers appeared, ragged lads carrying spears and one of them a makeshift standard.

Then from another quarter, from the road, appeared a handful of men on horseback, and them with well-made banners, and one of them the Tower Crowned.

Aeself was one of them, and slid down from his horse and walked forward as sleeping men began to wake to the commotion, hearing sounds in the world. Men leapt up, seizing weapons and shields, and calling out in alarm.

“Friends!” Aeself called out. “His Grace’s men!”

A third time Owl called, and the Shadows all were gone. More and more men came from out of the wood, men on horseback and peasants afoot, and a scattering of banners among well-armed and lordly folk.

Aeself went to one knee, and so did the others. “The King,” Aeself said, and so the others said, one voice upon the other, “the King.”

“There is a king,” Tristen protested, but there were more and more of them, spilling out of the trees, while the wood could in no wise have concealed all of them and he could not have been so deceived about their presence. They arrived like the Shadows, as if they had risen out of the stones and the earth, and a wind skirled through the clearing, startling the horses, lifting the banners half to life.

And Aeself rose, foremost of the rest, while Ivanim and Amefin, Imorim knights and Olmern axemen, and a scattering of Lanfarnesse rangers stood utterly dismayed, no less so than their lords.

Auld Syes arrived in their midst like a skirl of wind, fringed shawl flying like threads of cobweb, gray hair shining like the moonlight, and her daughter danced, holding her hand and skipping about her skirts.

—King in Elwynor, King Foretold: deny nothing! The aetheling has found his King, and peril to deny it!

He hoped with all his heart none of the men heard. He wished Auld Syes’ aid for all of them, and by no means rejected Aeself or the Shadows… how could he turn from Andas Andas-son and Earl Haurydd or deny the outpouring of so many wishes? If Men could bind a magic, he found himself snared in it, caught in their wishes, their long, faithful struggle in what he feared was his war, always his war… but now theirs, as well.

“My name is Tristen,” he said to them all as he had said to Hasufin Heltain. He said it as a charm and as the truth which anchored him in the world. “My name is Tristen. Nothing else.”

“King of Elwynor!” some cried, among the living, and the Amefin cried, “Lord Sihhë’!” But he shut his ears against it, and turned away, and in doing so, met the faces he most dreaded to meet: Uwen, as Guelen as ever a man could be; and Cevulirn, steadfast in his oaths; and Crissand Adiran, Amefin, aetheling, king of Amefel… all his friends, all with claims impossible to reconcile, one with the other.

“Lord Sihhë!” the Amefin all shouted now, and so the Elwynim took it up: “Lord Sihhë! Lord Sihhë! Lord Sihhë!”

That was the only truth he heard. He turned again to confront Auld Syes, but in that moment’s distraction the very light had changed to earliest dawn: there were no Shadows among them to answer, there was no lady and no child, only the shapes of trees and the shapes of Men still indisputably among the living. He knew what he had seen, but he could not believe that every man in the company had seen the same, and could not reconcile what he knew and what they knew, or reason out how much they had heard. They shouted for him: they wanted him with such a fervor it shook him to the heart, and yet he wanted nothing of it, nothing but Cefwyn’s safety.

And in hailing him, they turned from Cefwyn. The Elwynim and the Amefin hailed another king: they made him their lord, and would hear nothing else, while the southern lords who had followed him at risk of life and honor stood dismayed, not knowing what to do at this sudden turn of loyalties on the borderlands.

Tristen held up his hands, begging silence, and it was difficult to obtain, in the dim gray light that only hinted at the dawn.

“Lord Sihhë I am,” he said. “Lord Sihhë I am willing to be.” The cold dark seemed to gape beneath his feet, threatening to drink him in, and yet he strained to see their faces, in that hour that stole the stars. But no more than that, he wished to say… yet all along he had listened to Auld Syes, and was not sure she was wrong.

“Cefwyn is my friend,” he said, difficult as it was to speak at all. “Her Grace is my friend. Crissand is the aetheling, and Amefel has a king, the king of the bright Sun! But my name is Tristen!”

And with that he could bear nothing more, and turned away, past Crissand’s reaching hand, past Cevulirn’s grave face. Only Uwen went with him in his withdrawal, and his guard shadowed him until he had found a refuge at the edge of the horse pickets, where Dys and Cass stood and offered mute comfort.

He had left confusion behind him. He had left Aeself and Crissand and Cevulirn with wizardry unexplained. He had left the lords of the south with their understanding challenged. He thought he should have done better. But he could not find how.

He was aware of Owen’s presence, of his new guards, Gweyl and the others, and at this moment he sorely missed Lusin, who would stand by Uwen come what might. He ached heart-deep with what he feared, and what was laid on him to do, with no choice of his: it was what he was made to do. He apprehended at least that Auld Syes was not in charge of him, nor beyond mistakes, only charged with truths as she perceived them. He could refuse.

And his heart cried out against their expectations. It was not Cefwyn’s doom to fall. It was not his own to sit in a hall signing and sealing and rendering judgments, when this single judgment was so difficult.

He drew a deep breath when he knew that, as if bands had loosed about his heart. He looked up at a sky in which the stars had all perished, and at Uwen’s sober, stubbled face. Love shone there, brighter than the dawn; and he opened his arms and embraced Uwen, for all that Uwen was; in his heart he embraced Crissand, and Cevulirn, and the lords of the south, too, and Aeself, who had come by no ordinary road to find him, whether or not Aeself understood what company he had had or how unnaturally he had arrived.

He heard Owl complaining of the sun. He stood still, cold to the very heart of him, as if his very next breath hung suspended between day and dark.

Lord of Shadows he could be. That, more than Lord Sihhë, he might be. He knew the gray space: it would open for him, and he could draw power out of that realm, hurl the hapless dead against the dead that Hasufin summoned until between them they laid waste to the gray space as well as the lands of Men. The last struggle had imprisoned Shadows within the walls of Ynefel and brought down the towers of Galasien. Between them, Mauryl and Hasufin, they had done that: Mauryl, wielding wizardry, and Hasufin, wielding wizardry, had not seen the consequences of the struggle. But he saw that it would not last. At the last, Mauryl had seen the wards falter, he was sure of it: Galasien had perished in vain. It did not hold.

And Efanor and a small band of priests walked a perilous Line in Guelessar, as Emuin and Ninévrisë warded the south and Ni-névrisë’s father and Drusenan’s Wall held the border of Amefel.

It was to keep those barriers strong that he had arrived on Mauryl’s hearth.

“I dreamed,” he said to Uwen, who most knew the youth who had come to Amefel. “Such, at least as I do dream… that there’s something behind Hasufin, and the Sihhë-lords fought it, all those years ago.”

“Lad, such as I couldn’t tell.”

“This is true.” He could no longer bear to wait, not for the men who stood in doubt and debating among themselves what he had said, not for the disturbance in the wood where Shadows hid for the coming day. He would not be the king Auld Syes foretold. He was never suited to it: it was not—he was as sure of it as of the coming day. “Mauryl didn’t Summon me to sit on a throne,” he said. “Cefwyn hates it… but he’s a good king. I’m not what he is. None of us is what he is.”

Uwen was silent, in what mind he could not read.

“You don’t ask me what I am,” he said, curious, for curiosity was always his fault, and he could never understand the lack of it.

“Ye don’t rightly know, do ye?” Uwen answered him with a wry smile. “Nor me. Nor do I need to. Ye’re my good lad.”

“Uwen is what you are,” he said, “and the captain of my guard, and my right hand.” He reached out to Uwen’s leather-guarded shoulder, as much to feel his solid strength as to reassure Uwen. “Set us to horse. Make these men move. Cefwyn needs me. That’s what I know.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said with relief.

That was Uwen’s answer.

And for his own, when he went back to Cevulirn and Crissand, he took their hands, and embraced them in the murmurous hush of the army. He embraced Sovrag’s huge shoulders, and Umanon’s stiff back, and Pelumer’s thin and aged frame: he opened his arms to Aeself, when Aeself would have cast himself to his knees, and made him stand and have that, and not a lord to worship.

“My lord,” Aeself whispered.

“You can’t make me King,” Tristen whispered back. “Mauryl didn’t, and you can’t. But Sihhë, yes, as the five were, that I do fear I am.” Ice came to him, as strong a vision as if it had Unfolded for the first time, ice, and the fortress of the Qenes, a dizzying long view, a dizzying long remembrance, for memory it might be. He did not know where he had begun, but he knew what the boundaries of the world should be.

“Yet,” Aeself said, “others will join us, my lord, if only they see there’s hope: they’ll come as these men have come—not for me, not even for my cousin, gods save her: they’ll come to the name of the King.”

“Then believe there is such a King,” he said, for he drew that certainty out of his heart, breathless with the urgency with which he knew it. “He’ll be born: Ninévrisë’s child, and Cefwyn’s. And Cris-sand aetheling will sit the throne in Amefel. But my banner is not the High King’s.”

Loyalty that so yearned to bestow itself somewhere worth its hopes shone in Aeself’s eyes. “Then whatever that banner is, I am your man, and so are the rest of us. The forest brought us here. The earth poured us out. I don’t know how we came, but we’ve come here, and nothing frights us after this.”

“Auld Syes brought you. She may bring others. Until there is a King, I can say what is and what’s to be, and I set you in charge of all the Elwynim that come to my banner.”

“I am no experienced man—”

“I say what is.”

“Yes, my lord.” So Aeself said, and Tristen turned to a clearing filled with men and horses, and more men and horses within the trees. Their company had become an army, between dark and dawn.

“We go on!” Tristen said. “Everyone to your horses! Cefwyn needs us!” And turning from Aeself, he encountered Crissand, and pressed Crissand’s arm, for he saw confusion on Crissand’s face: the dawn showed it to him, a silent, but heartfelt distress.

“Auld Syes said it: aetheling. King of Amefel. —But Uwen I keep for myself.”

“My heart you keep, my lord! Have no doubt of it!”

He clapped Crissand on the arm. In the next moment he heard Uwen shouting at the men:

“Arm an’ out, arm an’ out, you lads, and get them horses ready. We’re off to give Tasmôrden ‘is comeuppance.”

It was a voice to give courage, a voice that had soothed his night fears and his darkest hours: give Tasmôrden his Comeuppance… there was a Word that by no means Unfolded to him, and yet did, as an outcome wider and more true than justice a king might deal out… it was justice for the Shadows that had joined them in the night, justice for Crissand’s father and Cefwyn’s messenger, for the old archivist and the soldiers dead at Emwy and on Lewen field… justice for very many wrongs: not a justice of death for death—rather the settling of balances back into true and the world back to peace.

Men moved, horses snorted and pulled at their tethers: the whole clearing seethed with an army setting itself rapidly in an order of march.

So Tasmôrden had moved, carrying the threat against Cefwyn, to deal hurt where their enemy could, to gain an advantage, a hostage, a distraction.

The five first Sihhë had retreated to the ice to avoid this very conflict as long as possible: had met it once in its ascendency and brought down Galasien. In its slow working, in retaliation, the enemy had seized Althalen… and lost it, destroyed Ynefel, and lost it.

Now it bided the second assault against its domain, beneath all the movement of armies and threat of iron: five Places in the land, where Shadows seethed, a Working of wizardous sort: five points of attack to confront five Sihhë-lords who afflicted it. Ynefel was last to fall to this onslaught: the old mews in the Zeide was the next to last, where now Emuin and Ninévrisë stood guard over Orien’s restive spirit. The third was Althalen, where Uleman now warded the way; the fourth he had set Efanor to watch, to shut the very first door it might ever have used…

All these ways it had had once at its command, and one by one he had denied it use of them, if the wardens he had set in place could hold firm the Lines.

All but one was shut, that in Ilefínian’s fortress, the way Crissand had discovered, when Tasmôrden had lost his banner.

And it Unfolded to him with the breaking of the dawn that their enemy might have arranged them to come to this conflict: but equally they were here because of what they were. There was no turning back now. The Sun King and the Lord of Shadows had come together to set the world and the gray space in balance as best they knew how, while their enemy meant to confound it entirely, and they had no choice. Whatever the grief it brought either of them, whatever the loss or the pain, they had come to do what neither wizardry nor magic yet had done, and not, this time, be held in check, one power with the other.

Halfway had not sufficed, and Mauryl had surely known it when he Shaped him out of fire and Shadow.

And he had known when he looked the first time at the aetheling, that he had found something essential to what he was. Mauryl’s spell had finished its Summoning, and he was here, finally, where all along he had needed to be, wizardry and magic opposed to the Wind that had torn Ynefel’s stones apart.

CHAPTER 4

The hills that had been only knowledge on a map became a forbidding rampart of stone and bristling evergreen distantly visible on the left hand, a rough land out of which small bands might come to spy or to harry the approach of an invader on the road that led to Ilefínian. Cefwyn had scouts out well ahead looking for just such a force, but they reported there was no sign of enemy presence.

It was troubling not to meet opposition: leaving unexploited the advantage that rocky ridge posed to its native lord was certainly not what Cefwyn would have done, were he defending Ilefínian, but then, Tasmôrden had failed all along to do those things that a prudent commander would have arranged—first of all not having a force at the bridge to have hindered their crossing, and archers in the woods to make their advance far slower than it had been for two days now.

And in that consideration Cefwyn heard the reports of the scouts and frowned, wishing his enemy would do predictable things that had to be fought: the man’s brutal dealing with the villages was a terror to Elwynor. Pretenders to the throne and the Regency for a time had been thick as the leaves in this land. It was worth remarking that all the other pretenders were dead, including Aséyneddin, who had perished at Lewenbrook, and that this man was at last report among the living.

That argued that the man was not the easy mark he had seemed all winter, and it suggested that taking too many of Tasmôrden’s gifts too recklessly might lead to the one gift an opponent should not have taken.

On the other hand, Tasmôrden might have a distraction from the other side of that ridge. Cefwyn hoped so. He imagined Tristen’s army approaching from that quarter and making Tasmôrden’s sleep entirely uneasy. Tasmôrden might have expected a Guelen army to move far slower and diverted resources to the western flank of that ridge to deal with Tristen and Cevulirn, who would come up from the south with the speed of light cavalry. That would trouble Tasmôrden’s dreams, if there was wizardry in question. So it was possible, Cefwyn said to himself, that he was simply that lucky.

But he refused to rely on it. He kept looking for the traps. He traveled as quickly as he could, strewing baggage behind him in one camp after another, against every rule in the Guelen book of war, following the will-of-the-wisp of Sihhë tactics and accepting the tactics he had refused when he had had Tristen at hand to advise him. No, he had said repeatedly, and now he followed that advice headlong, constantly aware of Ryssand at his back and Idrys gods knew where… too far, for his comfort; but Ninévrisë was safe. Against all likelihood of success, he had persuaded her away to safety and left himself free to fight… if he could only find the enemy in front of him.

His reasoning and his thus far fruitless expectations of what Tasmôrden should do to prevent him of course supposed that Tasmôrden owned the land through which they marched, and that was not necessarily the case. Those previous pretenders had dislodged the honest peasantry, rent the country asunder in civil war, and left men outlawed, bandits both by trade and by necessity ranging the countryside at will, so Maudyn reported to him.

And if he were a bandit leader, instead of Tasmôrden, he would sit up in the hills in the rocks and watch all the armies come and go, siding with the winner whenever that came clear. At the very least a heavy-armed cavalry was no likely pickings, at least until there had been a battle.

Above all else he kept waiting for the blow to fall. He expected no deep thinking or strategy from hungry outlaws, but he did expect it from a man who styled himself High King and heir to the Sihhë kingdom. He counted it possible that Tasmôrden could raise no support in the east, where all along Ninévrisë had maintained she had the loyalty of people too frightened and too weak to fight Tasmôrden on their own. But he had seen no Elwynim, either, come out of the brush to rally to the banner he flew at the head of their advance, and by now he doubted he would see any until he had at least damaged Tasmôrden. In a practical sense, he doubted Tasmôrden had much fear of scattered peasants.

They came on a village, mere shells of houses, which the scouts reported vacant, and it was clear by what they saw that the people who had lived there had reason to stay low and quiet if they lived, perhaps hiding in those hills yonder… or gone across the river to Tristen. It was no recent ruin. Vines overgrew one charred doorway. Weeds grew in the street.

“Gods know which pretender did this work,” Lord Maudyn said.

“Shame on him, whoever it was,” Cefwyn said, and added, with a chill in his blood and a thought of his own land: “Here’s the sad end of a civil war: vacant streets and fallow fields. Who had the good of this work?”

“Not the sheep and the shepherds,” Maudyn said.

A courier rode up beside them, presented courtesies, advised him Osanan was slowed by reason of a cart and a loose wheel.

Slowed by reason of Ryssand’s courtship, Cefwyn suspected uncharitably, but he acknowledged the report.

The lords with him and those with Ryssand had all been uncommonly courteous one to the other when they met in council in the evenings. They had pored over maps together in frosty amity and heard reports of the scouts. Ryssand’s partisans asked why Tasmôrden had not confronted them, and then the pretense had slipped aside ever so little as he looked straight at Corswyndam Lord Ryssand, to see whether Ryssand himself seemed to know the answer to that question.

But he had not caught Ryssand looking as if he knew: he was forced in marginal charity to suppose the consultation between Ryssand and Tasmôrden was somewhat more distant.

He had pretended forgiveness once Ryssand had joined their line of march, Ryssand had pretended contrition, and so they got along, and spread out the maps by lanternlight and pretended to have reconciled, though he doubted Ryssand believed it, for he surprised dour looks from time to time when Ryssand was thinking, and when he himself presented the half of his plans to draw Tasmôrden out of his walls and meet him at a brookside near Ilefínian.

So he did plan, if Tasmôrden did not march out sooner and fall on their marching column before they cleared the end of the ridge, or if arrows did not begin to hail down on them from the heights, a natural archer’s advantage. He had in fact dispatched a squad of the Prince’s Guard to hold that position and warn him.

But the meaningful councils had been of himself and Lord Maudyn, with Gwywyn and Anwyll and the Guard officers, when he had sent out that squad to take the heights just before dawn yesterday.

Maudyn and Gwywyn were his most knowledgeable advisors, men who had spent their lives at such questions as supply and the lay of the land. They laid their plans in event of this and that ambush, on maps Ninévrisë had corrected, her own handwriting, her own blessing on the maps, as if she continued to advise him even though absent: her notes were on the backs of the stout parchment, and wedged between the representation of a forest and that of a brook.

But unlike Tristen’s magical letter it could not speak to him with her voice and advise him what to do next.

It could not unfold the true sight of the ridge, for instance, to inform him how high and sheer the sides of it; or how deep the forest, or whether trees screened them from the rocks, trees that might stop arrows, or whether they would be exposed to fire if that squad failed its mission.

The map of this land was what he had to rely on, while he asked himself continually what in the gods’ sweet name he could do if Tasmôrden turned out to have wizardry to help him.

Give him an open, flat field and a fair fight, that was all he asked, but he doubted Tasmôrden would oblige him. Chase Tasmôrden all the way to Tristen’s army… that was his fondest hope, so he might catch Tasmôrden between the hammer and the anvil and be sure of him.

The bandits, the Saendal, who served Tasmôrden, would fight: here were men who would hang if they were captured. And since pretenders had succeeded one another, each killing the best of their enemy’s men, there could scarcely be a remnant with Tasmôrden much better than the Saendal bandits.

It did not encourage surrender, if the tide turned: they would fight like rats in holes, escape if they could, but his own plans were to provide no hole through which they could bolt: the land had troubles enough of the sort that had made that village a weed-grown desolation. He intended to tame this unruly land to bring it gently to Ninévris딑s hand, a wedding gift, a gift—the thought was still new to him—for their own heir to come.

The bloody Marhanen, as the south called him, would earn the name twice over before this war was done; well, that was nothing new. But his lady of the violets would not start her reign dealing with Saendal bandits.

That, however, was skinning the deer before the hunt. There was Ryssand yet to deal with… whose betrayal might not come off if Ryssand saw the war going against Tasmôrden, and he did not intend to provoke tension if it were avoidable. It was sure Ryssand would be no truer to one lord than to another, and if they looked to sweep

Tasmôrden before them, why, Ryssand might discover he was loyal after all.

Yet Ryssand might be the true reason Tasmôrden forbore to attack: that they awaited a place and a time Ryssand would strike.

And if Ryssand did strike, it would be in such a place Ryssand thought he could escape if things went badly.

Closer they marched, and closer still to Ilefínian, to solid walls, and to the friend and patron of Parsynan and Cuthan.

Closer to a refuge at need… and an assurance of safety for a traitor otherwise in jeopardy of his life.

If Tasmôrden were sure of Ryssand and Ryssand had never told Tasmôrden his king had suspicions of him, there was another reason Tasmôrden need not stir out and put himself to great effort: the war would come to him and the victory fall into his lap almost without bloodshed.

There was the reason, Cefwyn said to himself the farther they went without sight of the enemy. There was all the reason: Tasmôrden did not put himself to great trouble because he counted on the army of Ylesuin tearing its own throat and opening its veins quite obligingly on his doorstep. If things went completely his way, Tasmôrden might watch from the walls and enjoy the spectacle.

Ask whether Tasmôrden had the mildest suspicion that a man who would lie to his king would lie to him in his absolute assurances: if Tasmôrden were at all wise, Tasmôrden would ask himself such questions and doubt Ryssand’s character.

That was the difficulty of being a scoundrel, he supposed: that to a lord of bandits and mercenaries, Ryssand and Murandys seemed so ordinary.

All day he waited for some sign of the enemy.

At evening they made their third camp, canvas going up like white flowers in the sunset, and after the bawling of oxen and the clatter and squeal of the oxcarts laying down the few essential tents, and after the quick dispersal of the evening’s cold, fireless provender, quiet settled over the camp, the quiet of men ready, after a day’s march, to settle close around the small fires. They had not the luxury of bonfires and a camp under canvas, but canvas strung up for windbreaks and spread as cover for essential gear, and as warm as the days had become and as warmly as the sun beat down on a helm, there was still a winter nip in the air at night and enough damp to soak in.

And with the men settled to their evening’s occupation, the lords of Ylesuin set to their own pursuits, a sparse and plain supper in one of the few tents they had brought, with small ale and a session of politeness between enemies who eyed one another what time they were not putting on placid faces: but tonight Cefwyn brought out his second-best map in plain view and laid out the plans for encounter.

“Here,” Cefwyn said, laying a pen across the map at the ford of that brook, a broad trail of ink, and annotations as to depth and direction. “The long hill, first, and this brook between us and Ilefínian’s outbuildings. Our battle line will be heavy horse to the center, excepting Sulriggan, you, sir, to the right wing. The brook is not above hip deep to a man at flood, save only there may be holes, needless to say; good bottom, so there’s no fear of fording it if we find no bridge there. But I don’t wish to cross it, nor shall we, unless you hear the signal from me. I’d rather let Tasmôrden have his back to the water.”

There was doubt they could draw Tasmôrden across the bridge to encounter them on their chosen ground. So did he doubt it, and he little liked to practice the acts that might tempt a lord out of his citadel: burning fields and forests would not serve the peasant farmers they hoped to save, nor would it leave anything at all worth stealing after the bandits had had their way in the countryside. He did not say that he hoped for help when he crossed beyond the ridge. He never mentioned so curious a thing as a flight of pigeons in the wood.

But he went to his cot when the conference was done having had at last a satisfactory session with his entire command—and having had even Sulriggan, not the swiftest wit in the company, comprehend what he was to do, and what the signal was that would prompt him to advance. He had Sulriggan to the farthest right wing, Osanan to the left with Panys, and himself in the center… with Ryssand.

He had not anticipated to be so well pleased in dealing with Ryssand. He had been grudging with Ryssand, then enthusiastic; he thought it a masterful use of persuasion. In the end, he hoped Ryssand had believed desperation had made them allies, and that if Ryssand was the traitor he thought, Ryssand would lie abed tonight smug in the belief he had gotten what he wanted and that revenge for his ox of a son was not so distant.

Cefwyn had not expected to find it so, but with the council disposed of, under the weight of thick blankets, under canvas in comfort, while many of the men slept triple and quadruple in their tents, and with the day’s difficulties past, he heaved a deep sigh and found himself freed of his concerns of time and place and treachery. He let his imaginings drift southward and west to more pleasant thoughts and safer places.

He wondered what Ninévrisë thought tonight and whether she was asleep… whether the gift she had could make her aware of his thinking of her. Some claimed to know when a loved one was in difficulty, or when some great thing had happened completely over the horizon—so the peasants thought, at least, and them good Quinalt men.

Could not a true wizard-gift manage as much?

I love you, he said to the dark.

She was with Emuin, and master grayrobe would have his ear to the earth for very certain: his ear to the earth and his eyes to the sky for portents or whatever wizards looked for. If there was a magical breath stirring in the world, Emuin might know it, and pass it to Ninévrisë. He himself might be as deaf as his horse to such whispers out of the winds. But in the Zeide wizards and wizardry were constantly aware what went on. The old man likely knew exactly where Tristen was tonight, and where he was: that he was deaf to wizard-work might not help a wizard find him, but it had never seemed to hinder the ones he knew, either.

Had Ninévrisë met Tarien Aswydd? Almost certainly. He ached to think how she would have to face his cast-off lover and an unacknowledged child.

And when Ninévrisë and Tarien had met, had there been warfare? He imagined it, at least, but told himself Emuin would mute the quarrel and keep knives from the midst of it.

Might Ninévrisë forgive her? There was a question, too. He thought she might, for Ninévrisë could be astonishingly generous, but he feared that generosity.

And was Ninévrisë with child? He was sure of it as he was sure nothing else would have persuaded her to leave him. She was with child… gods help them both… for nothing wizards had a hand in could proceed without convolutions and calamities.

Her child… Tarien’s son… both his. He deserved the consequences of his own folly, but he had never thought a bastard or two mattered; he had never counted on loving the woman he married, or loving the offspring he had—how could he have planned on it? The mother of his son was supposed to have been Luriel, and that Luriel might take exception to his sleeping elsewhere had simply been a quarrel to save for the right moment in the perpetual warfare of a state marriage.

He thanked all the gods he had escaped Luriel of Murandys.

And he wished to the good gods he had not taken to the Aswydd twins to spite Luriel, to set her in her place as one woman among his many.

Folly, folly, utter folly, and the result of it reached Ninévrisë, at Tristen’s sending, of all unlikely sources. When he had gotten Tarien Aswydd a son he had not even known Tristen’s name, nor met the woman he would truly marry.

And on that thought he heaved himself onto his other side.

An object slid atop the bedclothes.

He blinked, eased the covers off his arm, and reached for it.

His hand met a well-worn hilt, a scabbard, and a small roll of some sort attached to it.

His heart skipped a beat. Whatever it meant, it was not his, and it likely was not his guards’.

Who had come so close while he drowsed? How had a sheathed dagger gotten atop his covers while he lay protected by four trusted guards, one at each corner of his tent?

It was stealth bordering on wizard-work, but he could not account for it. If Ryssand or one of Ryssand’s men had gotten in, why should they forbear killing him? In the battle there was far less certainty.

Whatever it was, there was not a light to be had in the tent; and he rolled out of bed and went out to his guard. “Bring a torch,” he said, and waited with his hands on that leather-bound hilt and the small tight roll of paper. The hilt was cross-laced. It came to him even as he held it in his hands that he knew this dagger, having seen it day after day.

At Idrys’ belt.

And was Idrys back? And was this some ill-timed jest at his expense?

Where are you? he asked the unresponsive air. Damn you, what game is this?

Surely, surely Idrys had left him this grim gift, and no enemy had done it: no one could have taken it from Idrys, surely not.

But if Idrys was back in camp—why not stay for questions? What in very hell was this nonsense of daggers and messages?

The guard brought a torch to the door, not inside, beneath the canvas. But even at that range the light confirmed what his fingers knew, that it was Idrys’ dagger.

He had to step outside into the full torchlight to read the crabbed small note tied to the hilt.

My lord king, it began, and that was indeed Idrys. She is safe. The

south has crossed the Lenúalim. Keep your own counsel. Ryssand is not the only danger. Someone within the inmost circles, yours or mine, intends to betray us. Be sure I am near, but say nothing regarding me. I fear lest we make this person desperate.

Is that all? he asked his Lord Commander in silence. He was indignant, wildly angry with the man.

Standing at the door of his tent, blinded by the torchlight, he looked outward into a circle of bleached canvas, all of which informed him nothing, none of which revealed a traitor in his councils.

Was it one he had already excluded? Or was it one he still trusted?

Is that all you can say, crow?

Gods, give me more than this!

—Oh, gods, what have I said in council—and to which of my trusted officers?

CHAPTER 5

They marched, an army now, and gathered scattered bands from woods and hills as they came. “The King!” the newcomers shouted, undeniable in Auld Syes’ declaration and the witness of the Shadows that moved with them, a waft of wind, a chill and a movement in thickets.

Two boys, Elwynim peasant lads in ragged clothes, armed with makeshift spears, joined them from across a meadow, knelt briefly in the grass to profess their allegiance, and ran to join the beckoning troop that marched beside the lords’ guards: Aeself marshaled them, an unruly mob in some part, but Aeself’s men rode in order, and instructed the newcomers, nothing more than how to stand in a line if they brought shields or pikes or instructions to shoot from the woods if they brought bows: most of all Aeself instructed them to respect the red bands and make no mistake in it.

Tristen had refused the honor they gave: to Crissand and Cevulirn and Umanon, riding beside him, he said, “I don’t wish it. But I fear wishing against it… I daren’t. Can you understand?”

Umanon blessed himself with a gesture, a Quinalt man, and solid in that faith, like Efanor, clearly wishing not to think about it.

Cevulirn said, “Auld Syes has always told us some form of the truth. But that, you’d know better than I, Lord of Althalen. And I’d not go against her.”

No longer did Cevulirn call him Amefel: he had made that Crissand’s honor, and given that banner and the Amefin Guard into Crissand’s command, while he took command of all the army—not because he wanted it, but because if magic favorable to him was flowing that direction, he dared not refuse it. “I wish Cefwyn well,” Tristen said under his breath, with as much force as he could put into the wish: for he felt an abiding fear now, the sense that something weighty resisted him. He wished Cefwyn well hourly, when circumstances allowed him; he did it mindfully and fiercely, but all the while feared making Cefwyn so evidently the center of his thoughts… and that… that was a dangerous fear in itself. Magic worked to advance Tasmôrden’s cause, but magic resisted his own will as nature never had: it was wild and unpredictable, shifting its center moment by moment, as if he contested right of way with someone in a narrow hall. Every move found a counter. It was like swordwork.

It was not like Hasufin at all.

This other thing reached into the world… not everywhere, but at Ilefínian; and, if he sent his senses abroad, from several other discrete points in the map, south and west, and over toward Ynefel, and south toward Henas’amef, and east again, toward Guelemara, and the altar he had set Efanor to ward… he felt not a scattered assault, but a simultaneous one, as if something vast struggled to escape. Force skipped and thrust against those scattered portals, a force changing direction by the moment, able to do this, do that, change footing, no consulting its charts and awaiting its proper moment.

In the haste and confusion of Unfolding world he had not early on noticed a difference in the effort it took him to do things, or known why some things worked easily and some eluded him with unpredictable result. It was like Paisi, whose young legs darted up stairs without thinking: it was easy for Paisi, so he did it: but Emuin, aching in every bone, planned his trips on the stairs carefully and begrudged every one.

Magic was easy for him. Everything had been easy for him in Ynefel. Think! Mauryl had had to tell him. Flesh as well as spirit! Don’t let one fly without the other!

Mauryl had pinned him to earth, and made him do things the slow, the thoughtful way. Emuin had taught him to reckon his way through difficulties, how to govern Men without wishing them capriciously one way or the other… how to deal with friends, and how to have Men of free will about him: that was the greatest gift, greater than life itself.

What must it have been for a wizard like Mauryl, bound to times and seasons, to try to teach such a creature as he was? I never know what you’ll take in your head to do, Mauryl had complained to him, and now he understood that saying, that it was not just running naked in the storm on the parapet, but willing and wishing and having his own way.

What must it have been to try to teach one ready to wish this and wish that, a dozen spells in a day, and power Unfolding to him by the day and the moment, events tumbling one over the other? A passing moth had been as fascinating to him as a lightning stroke, and when he wanted something, tides flowed through the gray space that he had not yet perceived existed: to him in those days, the world had drowned all his senses in color and taste and noise.

Flesh as well as spirit, Mauryl had taught him… and that spirit in him was a perilous spirit, and able to do things Mauryl could not possibly prevent, breaking into utter, reckless, joyous, ignorant freedom.

But could magic work harm?

Oh, easily.

He wanted advice. He wanted someone to tell him the right way.

—Auld Syes, he called, for he dared not reach to Emuin. He reached out in an instant of fear and uncertainty, and a blast of wind came up in their faces and out of nowhere. Dys came up on his hind legs. Horses shied off from it.

And when Dys came down on all fours and danced forward, a gray old woman walked between him and Crissand.

“Grandmother,” Crissand whispered to her.

“Auld Syes,” Tristen said. “What is this thing in Ilefínian?”

Auld Syes was gone before he had quite finished saying it, but streaks ran through the meadow ahead, and in the gray space a storm broke, sweeping the pearl gray cloud into slate-colored strands.

There Auld Syes stood, assailed by the winds, and attempting to bold her place.

There Owl flew, scarcely maintaining against the gale.

—So, said a voice that sent shivers of ice through the air. Mauryl’s Shaping. So, so, so, come ahead.

He had never met the like, and yet it seemed he might have dreamed it, long, long ago, a Wind that rattled the shutters and set the faces in Ynefel’s walls to moaning.

—Mauryl’s enemy, he surmised. Not Hasufin this time.

—Hasufin, the Wind scoffed. Hasufin the bodiless. Hasufin who has no shape, nor life, nor wit. I’ve missed Mauryl, and lo! He sent me a surrogate.

A presence flew near him. Owl settled on his shoulder. Auld Syes, her substance streaming gray threads, arrived on his other side, his guides, the defenders of wizardry and magic.

—You were at Ynefel, Tristen said. And you are not Hasufin.

—Oh, names, names, names. Names have no power. Places have none. I have many Places.

Mauryl had despaired of his Summoning’s actions, and warded the windows, and warded his dreams and nights as well, with especial care.

—Feared you? the Wind mocked his thoughts. Oh, with great reason Mauryl feared you. Afraid, are you? Afraid to draw breath? Afraid you’ll break these fragile things?

In his unfettered anger was the terror of any soul who could rend its protectors and its home apart. He posed a fearful danger to those he loved. And Mauryl had held him, restrained him, taught him, and kept him out of the world long enough, as long as Mauryl’s strength lasted.

—And what have you done since? the Wind asked him. Wished this, wished that, turned a king of men to your bidding, all to bring you here, to me? Do you value him? I think you do.

—Leave him be!

—Can you bid me? I think not. Hasufin thought he could bid me. Mauryl brought the Sihhë out of their retreat, and last of all brought you… only one, this time. The old man was at the end of his strength, and Hasufin’s become a shell of a creature… both mortal, in the end. I wish another such, I think…

It tried him. It reached for Crissand, and for Cevulirn, nearest to him, but Tristen was as quick and they were wary, so that instantly the gray space cleared, and Auld Syes stared at him, her gray hair all disordered, her eyes dark as cinders.

—The same kind, Auld Syes said, but not the same. King thou art. Take up the sword!

“What is it?” Crissand asked, and Cevulirn, silent, stared grim-faced toward the north.

But Tristen found no Name for it: he perceived only the sweep of winds toward an abyss out of which that Wind had come.

“Magic,” was the best Word he could find. “Magic gone to sorcery. Not Hasufin. It was Hasufin opposing us, but he’s gone. This remains.”

He could only think of the cloud in the gray space, pouring continually over the Edge. And the gray space continued to pour out its force, as if magic had no limit and the flood would never cease.

“What’s amiss?” Uwen asked, looking from them to the north and back again. The horses were restive, disturbed by the streaks in the grass. “Summat’s goin’ on.”

“He’s gone,” Tristen said again. A magic gone amiss: in the pre-cise way Men parsed words he found no words for it. Sorcery was wizardry turned askew. What could Men know of what he had felt opposing him, its power and its grip on the elements?

If it existed, it was nameless, unless someone had bidden it into Shapeless existence long, long ago; it owned no master now, and it was by all he perceived every other creature’s enemy. What it wanted, it willed, and what it willed, it willed without a thought to any creature but itself. It was magical, and it was free, and set no limits on itself such as Mauryl had continually dinned into him. It had learned no patience with frustration such as Emuin had taught him.

And to wield magic after that unfettered fashion when there was only oneself with that power… that was inconceivable to him: what if there were no Mauryl, no Emuin, no Uwen or Cefwyn? What if there never could be for him a Crissand or a Cevulirn?

Lord Sihhë! the people cried in the streets of Henas’amef. Lord Sihhë, the word had gone through an army discouraged from calling him King.

But what was this thing?

And what was he?

Sihhë? And what was that?

That was the question of all questions, the one question no one of his friends could answer. He was not sure even Mauryl could have answered it completely—although Mauryl had known to call on the Sihhë to deal with the threat Hasufin posed.

And did that not inform him something? Mauryl had known that magic would stop Hasufin, when his student Hasufin turned. So Mauryl had understood: Mauryl had known the source of Hasufin’s wrongdoing.

Mauryl could not defeat this magic without help, and then had defeated only Hasufin, and that not completely. Not even the five Sihhë-lords had completely overcome this threat, for through Hasufin this threat found its way into Althalen after the five were gone.

The question began to gnaw at all confidence… it came as an assault, an opening thrust from the enemy.

What was he?

Lord of Shadow, with the Lord of the Sun. His blade was Illusion and Truth, dividing one from the other.

“Where,” he asked those with him, “where do you suppose the Sihhë came from?”

“The north,” Uwen said. “As they say.”

“But before that?”

“It was never recorded,” Cevulirn said. “Not in any account.”

“They were not good,” Tristen said. “It’s nowhere recorded that they were good, only that they were strong.”

“Barrakkëth was the friend of our house,” Crissand said They wielded magic; they lived together under one roof and rode and fought together in the south. But they were not all kind, or good, or gentle—in fact the histories recorded the opposite: yet they had never wielded their magic to seize all will from their subjects never turned it to have their own way from each other, fought no wars within the five. They had that much wisdom.

Only five, and no children, no women: could such as the Sihhë arise by nature… or were they something created, as he was created creatures of less than a lifetime?

There were no tombs such as Ulernan’s, no trace of their passing

It was never recorded that they died, only, the records said, that Barrakkëth passed the rule to another, and that was all.

He felt cold in all his lims, the chill of earth and darkness His gloved fingers maintained their grip on the reins. His eyes maintained a hold on the sky and the horizon: he would not slip into that dark would not go over the Edge, where the Wind alone held sway Lord of Shadows, Lord of the Sun: without shadow and light never settling.

“Speak to me,” he begged those with him.

‘‘M’lord?” Uwen answered, that potent, commanding voice that brought the land and the day and the war back to him. And Uwen experienced of such demands, heaved a great sigh and remarked how fair a day it was: “As there’s a good breeze, ain’t there? Which wi’ the sun beatin’ down on armor is a good thing, ain’t it?”

“A good thing,” he said desperately. His heart was hammering against his ribs. He breathed as if he had run a race. He had met the enemy. Crissand and Cevulirn gazed at him with alarm.

But he looked to the horizon, where trees met meadow… where still more stragglers, peasants and battered men-at-arms, survivors of lost battles and defeated lords, came to join their march. They had flowed to him since last night with the currents moving in the world, and after what he had seen, he knew that all things opposed to what sat in Ilefínian must flow to his banner… all that was Elwynim, all that was the south, whoever would, be could not deny them now. Auld Syes was the voice that spoke for them, but the summoning magic ran through the land and the woods and hour by hour the rocks gave up fugitives such as Aeself and his men… he felt pres-ences far and wide; he felt their moving through the land though to the east he was blind… a veil he himself drew over that one force his heart yearned to see, with all that was wrong in it.

“The Sihhë ruled for hundreds of years,” he said, thinking of Cefwyn and Ryssand. “They never fought each other.”

“It’s not recorded that they did,” Cevulirn said to him, and, perhaps thinking of the same conflict: “Wiser than we, it seems.”

Restraint ran between the lines of all that Barrakketh had written in his Book… he remembered. Line after Line Unfolded to him, not alone the nature of magic, but the Shape of the world, the restraint that let the world Unfold in its own time.

He had burned that Book to keep it from other hands, and now it seemed to him that he might have possessed and destroyed that for which the junior archivist had murdered his senior: that not only Men had yearned to find among those mundane letters and requests for potions the very thing he had had… and destroyed.

Knowledge of the enemy was there.

The fount of those words was in himself, but now that he inquired of it, he found of all the words that Barrakketh had ever poured onto parchment, the two true ones were written on opposite sides of his sword: Truth, and Illusion.

“They never fought each other,” he said aloud.

And the truest thing of all was the Edge between the two, the dividing line, the line of creation and destruction, dream and disillusion. There had to be both, for there to be movement at all in the world.

In his heart he could all but hear Mauryl’s voice saying, Boy! Boy, listen to me! Pay attention, now! This is the crux of the lesson!

“Ye’re woolgatherin’,” Uwen observed. “Lad, are ye with us?”

He drew a deep breath. He smiled at Uwen, who alone of them could wake him to the ordinary world.

“You still have that power,” he said to Uwen.

“What power, m’lord?”

“To call my name.” He glanced solemnly aside at Crissand and Cevulirn on the other side. “I obey Uwen’s voice as no other,” he said, “and I gave him the calling of me. It’s a magic he can do. Wherever I wander, Uwen can always find me.”

“As I’d follow ye to hell, m’lord,” Uwen said. “Ye know that.”

“I’d rather you called me out of it,” he said. He had no true knowledge what the Quinalt meant by it, but he knew where he had fared when he faced Hasufin Heltain.

He knew where he would go now when he faced the enemy.

“Guard Uwen,” he said to Crissand and Cevulirn. “Make sure he’s safe.”

“That’s the wrong way about, m’lord, them guardin’ me.”

“Yet that’s His Grace’s word,” Crissand said.

“A Man,” Tristen said. “And my friend, and wise as wizards.”

“Oh, that I ain’t!” Uwen cried.

“Trust Uwen,” Tristen said to his friends, and in his mind’s eye he saw Barrakkëth’s Book, its pages curling as it burned.

When he had cast the Book into the fire he had been armed as now, ready to ride against Hasufin: so he was now, astride Dys and armed and with Uwen beside him.

He used great care when he let anything in that Book well up out of the dark: its answers informed him there was much of illusion in what he loved.

Past and present and time to come mingled in the old mews, and in Ynefel, and in those other places: had been and might yet be were interchangeable in those places: they were the easiest path for magic, and his enemy had found a toehold in each and every one.

He found the meadows and woods gone dim around him, and the light gone to brass.

He saw a child dancing across the dry gold grass before them. A wind blew the grass and followed that child, and that wind suddenly smelled of storm.

“That’s odd,” Uwen said. “Smells like rain an’ the sun’s shinin’ and the sky is blue. An’ I swear that’s a cloud just come above the ridge.”

“I wish it mayn’t rain,” Tristen said, but spent little strength to wish it. He still saw the child, but no one else did, not even Crissand or Cevulirn.

Troops of Shadows seemed now to follow the child, Auld Syes’ daughter, who had lived once, he was sure, and danced in the meadows, a long, long time ago: as there had been nothing ordinary about Emwy village, where Auld Syes had seemed to be in authority. Men had died, and thereafter Emwy village had perished, lost, perhaps not for the first time.

In magic, time itself came unhinged, and Emuin’s Great Year governed the progress of the world only so far as to say that strange appearances were easier than at other times.

Mauryl had brought the Sihhë from the north. But who had Summoned them? And out of what?

He looked at the sky, looked at the bare trees and at the sun on Dys’ black mane. The world was so beautiful, and there was so much of it: he could gaze forever at the wonder of leaves and not see them all: could inhale the wind and not smell all its scents, hear the sounds of men and horses and not hear all the sounds of the woods, and taste the thousand flavors in stale water and still find it wonderful… because it was not darkness.

The darkest night in the darkest room in the world was not that darkness which was behind his first memory of Mauryl’s fireside. And that was not the worst that might befall.

He would fight to live. He knew that now. He would fight to keep these things, aside from all reasons Mauryl had Summoned him. He had gathered his own reasons, and was not, now, Mauryl’s creature.

Barrakkëth, some said, even his dearest friends.

But he said Tristen, and he said it with every breath he drew.

The dagger rested concealed in Cefwyn’s boot, for if Idrys had come by stealth, Cefwyn thought it wise to keep the secret, and hid that weapon which some eyes might recognize. He rode Danvy at the head of the Dragon Guard. Anwyll’s contingent being newly joined to the main body, Anwyll was close by him; and he ordered the Guelens to bring up the rear and the Prince’s Guard to hold a place at the middle of their line of march, lest any surprise attack should try to split the column of less experienced provincials.

The land was roughest here, so the maps had indicated and so it was. Rocks encroached from the left and the trees spilled down off the heights and across the road. Weeds had grown here during more than one summer, legacy of Elwynor’s civil conflicts.

It was the third day, and from Ryssand and his allies as yet he had had no dissent, possibly the longest period of peace with Ryssand he had known since he had come to his capital. Knowing that Ryssand was about to be a traitor was a distinct relief from wondering what Ryssand was about.

But now there was more worry, which had arrived with the dagger and the message.

A traitor near him. A traitor to whom he might have confided all his plans, when plans were hard come by, and hard to change.

Unfair, he said to Idrys, scanning the trees and the rocks and wondering whether Idrys watched the column from that rough outcrop or from the depths of the woods. He was vexed with Idrys, not an uncommon thing in dealing with the Lord Commander, but no signal he could give would order Idrys in.

He needed advice on a matter far more important than Ryssand’s treason and Ryssand’s conspiring with someone he trusted.

We have a war to fight, have you noticed, perchance, master crow?

Should I care that one more of my barons would put a dagger in my back? I am not destined to be a well-loved king, but thus far and somewhat by my own wits I am a live one. Come in! Stop this skulking in the bushes… it ill behooves a commander of the king’s armies.

Damn, he said to himself as birds flew up, startled from a thicket.

He found he was anticipating attack, not attack from one of his barons, but attack out of the woods that were no more than a thin screen between them and the ridge… not enough to prevent archery lofted over and down, if Tasmôrden were so enterprising. He had sent his scouts ahead to investigate the heights he had sent a squad to occupy, indeed, but the essential trouble with scouts was that they had to come back to report what they saw. A man with critical information might not be able to come back, might be lying dead with a dozen arrows in him.

So might Idrys, if he went poking and prying into the woods ahead, if he had his attention all for the barons and none spared for the enemy.

And which of the barons, or which of the officers, was a traitor to him?

He refused to suspect Maudyn or Maudyn’s sons: Sulriggan’s turning on him would be no news and no loss. He had never been sure of Osanan.

He led the rest, not reckoning any one of them a potent threat, not reckoning Murandys would dare cross him: that alliance of Mur-andys with Ryssand was lately frayed; and Murandys was not a man to take rash and independent action.

Anwyll was never suspect, either. Complicity could not possibly lie in that face, in those forthright blue eyes. There was never a man less given to conspiracy: Anwyll always expected honesty of the world, was indignant when he found otherwise; and for the rest of the officers, they had served Ylesuin in his father’s reign and served with honor, no marks against any of them.

An owl called by daylight, and drew alarm from the men nearest. Maudyn laid a hand on his sword. But then a true owl took to the air and flew off across their path, so Maudyn laughed, and no few of the men did.

Then a horseman came from around the bend of the road and toward them at breakneck speed.

Attack came: there was no question—and they had not reached the chosen battlefield. Cefwyn’s heart leapt and plummeted, seeing the guardsman rode perilous in balance, the dark stain of blood on his red surcoat, an arrow jutting from his back.

“Form the line!” Cefwyn shouted, and already the banner-bearers halted and spread out across the meadow: they wanted all the open land they could take, the devil and Tasmôrden take the woods where heavy horse could not have effect.

They might have met the ambush attack of some bandit, some startled peasant farmer; or it might herald the presence of an enemy whose surprise was spoiled.

The scout came riding up, scarcely staying in the saddle, and managed his report:

“Enemies in the valley next, a line, a camp…” The man had used all the wind he had, and sank across his horse’s neck.

“Tend this man!” Cefwyn ordered, and shouted orders next for the banners to advance and compact the army again into a marching line spearheaded by heavy cavalry. “Panys!” he shouted at Lord Maudyn. “Take the left as we come through.” They had a barrier of woods yet to pass to reach that place the scout described, which by the condition of the scout might mean hidden archers on either side of the road. “Shields! Lances!”

Here was the battle he had come for. Tasmôrden had come out of his walled town, fearing, perhaps, that its surviving population was too hostile, its secrets were too well reported; and so they were: Ninévrisë had told them to him in great detail, and swore, too, that such townsmen as still lived could never love this lord, of all others.

The sun was shining, the hour toward noon: there was no impediment to the fight they had come for… and Tasmôrden came out to fight, relying most on traitors to do their work.

So Cefwyn instructed his Guard: “Watch my back!” They knew from whom to guard it; and there was no more time for musing. A page brought his shield and another his lance, young men themselves armed and well mounted, young men whose duty now was to ride with messages, and so he dispatched them down the line to advise the hindmost to arm and prepare, and the baggage train to draw up and bar the road with the carts, save only a gap through which they might retreat if they had to ride back through the woods: an untidy battle if it came to that, but the saving of some if the encounter went badly, the saving of part of an army that might come home to Ylesuin, to Efanor’s command… if it came to that.

He took the precautions, but he had no intention of losing. His grooms brought Kanwy up, his heavy horse, and with the groom’s help he dismounted from Danvy and mounted up on a destrier’s solid force, settled his shield, looked on the descent of a low hill and the strand of woods that ran from the road to the left slope, screening all the land in that direction, away from the ridge: they had climbed gradually for two days. Beyond this, his maps told him there was one great long slope before they reached the end of the ridge, a long ride down to the valley where he most expected Tasmôrden to meet him, beside what his best map, Ninévrisë’s map, warned him was wooded land.

He had fought in worse land, on the borders. They had come downhill out of the brush into a Chomaggari picket barrier, and had had to climb over it. Such hours came back to him, and with the high beating of his heart, the confidence that the Elwynim, aside from their bandit allies, were not disposed to such ambushes: it was heavy horse they were bound to meet ahead, lines that mirrored their lines: the shock of encounter and the skill of riders to carry through.

The king of Ylesuin, however, did not carry the center of the charge, not today.

Leave that to Ryssand and Murandys.

CHAPTER 6

One moment Tristen’s company crossed a wide meadowland in the bright sunlight; and in the next, slate gray ribbons of cloud raced across the heavens, broader and broader, until, rapid as the drawing of a canopy, the sun gave up a last few shafts.

“Gods!” Crissand said, for it was not only the gray space which changed so easily, but the world itself which had shifted, and Men and horses faltered in their march, dismayed. From the confidence of a world that could change but slowly, they had entered a territory where magic met magic and the sun itself was overwhelmed.

A sudden gale buffeted the foremost ranks, and lightning cracked and sheeted across the hills. From ranks behind them came wails of dismay: seasoned veterans and country lads who had run to the banners of the High King met hostile magic and wavered in their courage as the lightnings gathered alarmingly above their heads.

Tristen flung up his hand and willed the lightning elsewhere. It took a tree on the wooded ridge to their left: splinters flew in a burst of fire.

Owl came winging to him, and swung a broad, self-satisfied circle, on a light breeze.

—Well, well, said the Wind. We are quick to seize the advantage, are we not? And confident?

—Owl! Tristen would not distract himself in debate with his enemy. He let Owl settle on his fist, and sent out one burning message through the gray space to all he loved and trusted, nothing reserved now: Ward yourselves! Let nothing in or out!

“Damn!” Uwen said on the heels of the lightning strike. “That were close!”

“Do you hear it?” Tristen asked him, and then thought, foolishly, no, of course not. Crissand and Cevulirn might have heard the Wind speak. But Uwen did not. The army stood in ignorance, blind to its real danger, its confidence shaken by the lightning.

One rider came up from the ranks in haste: Aeself drew his frantic horse to a halt and pointed to the horizon ahead.

“Ilefínian!” Aeself said. “Just beyond the hill, my lord! The end of the ridge!”

“Then move ahead!” Tristen said, for when he ventured to know what Aeself said was there, he felt the truth of the threat in the gray space, a tightly warded opposition, so wrapped about with magic it was hard to see at all as that near him. He set Dys in motion, and reached out in the gray space for Crissand and Cevulirn both, settling his own protection on the likeliest targets of hostile magic. Such as they knew how, they warded him, and Uwen, too, while Owl lofted himself again and flew outward and back, a long gliding passage that ended on Tristen’s outreaching hand as they crested the hill.

Here the stony ridge ended in a long, forest-girt plain, and a last outrider of that ridge, a hill rose within the valley. On that hill, towers and town walls rose from skirts of winter-bare pasturage and fields.

Lightning sheeted across the sky, a wall of brilliant light, west to east, and against it that distant fortress stood clearly to be seen, above its strong town walls. It was a Place as Ynefel was a Place, ancient and deep-rooted, and in the fire across the heavens it unveiled itself in all its power. Tristen felt it and shivered in the crash of thunder.

Far to the south, the Lady Regent herself knew they had come to her capital.

To the west, Efanor, at his prayers, knew.

And in the ranks, the Elwynim behind them knew, and raised a shout that drowned the thunder.

“The king!” someone cried, and other voices shouted it: “The High King and Elwynor!”

But others shouted, “Lord Sihhë!”

And clearer to him than all the voices was a sense of foreboding presence beyond the ridge that pointed like a spearhead toward Ilefínian, the knowledge of lives at risk the moment Men and horses set themselves in motion.

Cefwyn was in danger, Tristen thought in anguish. He had brought his army where he wished, to the end of the ridge, and in sudden clarity he knew Cefwyn was on the other side, he knew the enemy lay in wait, where he could come at them from behind, but he could not turn aside. Cefwyn was in reach of Tasmôrden’s forces, in peril from his own men… but worse—he was within reach of Ilefínian, where the danger was wrapped not in iron edges, but in an ageless, malevolent will.

“It has to fall!” he shouted to those nearest, to Uwen and Crissand and Cevulirn, and pointed toward the fortress on its hill. “We cannot go to the east! We have to break the wards of that place, or Cefwyn will die. They all will die!”

The carts went into place, a line between the rocks and the woods, men hauling gear off the carts in feverish haste—casting anxious looks at the heavens, for a pall of cloud flowed from over the ridge, west to east, and all across the horizon what had seemed hazed blue sky proved to be gray. Lightning raced across the heavens and thunder boomed from off the heights, and now men looked up from their work in fear.

“Form the line!” Cefwyn ordered his forces as lightning cast white light over all of them, once, twice, thrice. “Form the line, Ylesuin! We’ve beaten wizards before! Forward, the banners’.”

He let Kanwys have rein, wary of the woods that fringed the road on the right… on the right, where shields were on the left. Those woods slanted away rapidly toward the right as he moved past the trees into meadow, and there the hill arched away downward, while on the left the ridge descended with it in a tumble of rocks the size of peasant huts. He knew his maps: this was the dizzyingly long, broad downslope which both his grandfather’s maps and Ninévrisë’s warning had told him was a long, long highland… but gods! All the subtle rise of the land over two days came downhill at once, grassland pasturage spread out for a long, long, uninterrupted descent to the cultivated plain. The view captured the eye, distracted the wits, suddenly beset with the scale of that descent, while the sky flickered with no natural storm.

But the Dragon Guard advanced, men who had stood before worse than this. The Prince’s Guard moved, and so did Ryssand and Nelefreissan and Murandys, earliest ready, a wall of iron to shield men still preparing.

Were it not for the courage of the scout the army would have had no warning until an assault disorganized their line of march. “Bear east!” Cefwyn said. “Dragons! Ryssand! Hold center! Panys to the right! Bring the blackguards out in the open!”

Messengers sped and banners moved outward under the flash of lightning. As Panys’ line formed, light midlands cavalry probed the border of the woods—and rapidly fell back before a howling outrush of motley armed men.

Irregulars, the Saendal, armed with axes and pikes and bows, and the force with which they charged was considerable even across the slope and on the uneven ground. Brigands, hirelings, hill bandits who regarded no law but gold, hire, and murder… with them Murandys’ stolid peasant infantry proved of some use, standing for a first taste of battle largely because they did not regard the trumpet signal that called them back, and for a moment there was a sharp contest, before some of Maudyn’s forming right wing alike began to give backwards, disengaging in the distance across the hill.

“Hold fast!” Cefwyn shouted, chafing to have the rest of the heavy horse move up from behind. He chosen to engage the brigands’ ambush quickly on this eastward fringe of woods, to keep the enemy from harrying their flank. Two of his allies, Sulriggan and Osanan, were still behind the lines, equipping their heavy horse to bring them forward, please the gods, at some convenient time: damn Sulriggan’s lackluster drills!

Ryssand, however, had moved with dispatch, and so had Murandys, spreading their forces behind the immediate deployment of the red-coated Dragon Guard and the company of light horse who went at the ready.

And granted Ryssand’s naive peasants who had gotten in the way of the Guard and trammeled up their advance, those peasants still had made a line, a line they must hold long enough for the heavy horse to set itself in order. He was sure now Tasmôrden’s main force lay closer than that streamside he had planned to have for a battlefield, never dreaming Tasmôrden would give him the advantage of the higher ground, but knowing it had its disadvantages, too, in the very momentum it gave them.

Traps were more than possible.

“Guelens, Maudyn, damn it, Guelen Guard!—Tell him so, boy! Ride!”

If Ryssand’s and Murandys’ peasant farmers yielded more ground on the flank, where they had crowded together, he had to trust the Guelens, the city troops among them, would account the skirmish with the Saendal their sort of brawl. And as he shouted the order another messenger of the Guard scrambled to horse and was off behind the confused wing to reach Lord Maudyn.

The embattled Dragons, too, under Gwywyn, bore toward the tangle of the peasant line, not where he wanted them situated, for this attack he was certain was meant to create as much confusion as it could, pouring downhill at the back of his right wing if he had formed early, at very least keeping him from coming onto that slope unreported to the enemy.

“Majesty!” Now, now, there was a general movement of Sulrig-gan’s heavy horse from out of that screen of carts and forest. Cefwyn settled his shield and stilled Kanwy with his knees, putting him to this side and the other to settle his restless forward impulse. That would be the difficulty, with all the men: the impulse to charge downhill. Discipline; discipline: a peasant army could not restrain itself; veterans could scarcely restrain themselves when tumult surrounded them and deafened them to signals.

“Lance!” he shouted at his pages, and the solid ash arrived within his grip. His guard had gathered around him, and now others of his house guard had arrived, the heavy-armed center of the Dragons and the Prince’s Guard, Gwywyn’s ordinary command, solid heart of Guelen force. Panys’ younger son, near him, caught away from his father’s command, had his grooms fighting to further tighten a cinch, the horse wild-eyed and resisting.

And in the skirmish with the lad’s recalcitrant horse, one of those cursedly ridiculous incidents that precede battle, for some reason, no reason at all, he found himself in high good spirits, all the strictures and obligations of kingship fallen away from him.

“Dragons!” he shouted out, sending Kanwy on a restrained, restless pace near Anwyll’s command. “Trumpeter, sound out! Form the line! Banners! Form and stand! By the plan!”

Banner-bearers spread out, signaling men where their companies should be. And, unraveling the chaos that had threatened the right wing, the veteran Dragons answered quickly to the trumpets and the movement of the banners and set position on the left.

Osanan drew his men into line: that was the centerward edge of the left wing; and Panys and the Guelens maintained the skirmish on the right wing, while Sulriggan’s company moved in feverish and wasteful haste, crossing to the fore of the Prince’s Guard, not the rear as he ought—damn the man! Cefwyn thought, but it was ineptitude, not treason.

More slowly, with laudable precision, Ryssand, Murandys and Nelefreissan, heavy horse and the center of the line, took their place and stood firm.

In the distance Maudyn’s trumpeter sounded out another call that called the right wing to desist pursuit: the engagement there, which Cefywn could not see from the left wing, had become a downhill rout it was not Maudyn’s choice to pursue: gods knew whether the peasant infantry remembered that trumpet signal, or knew theirs from Tasmôrden’s.

More precise than the trumpets, the banners were a constant signal; and three more king’s messengers hovered close at Cefwyn’s side, awaiting orders that would send last-moment changes to the line, to answer whatever surprises Tasmôrden had contrived.

There was a moment that the army was poised, prepared. Everything they had done toward this moment came to the test.

The wooded ridge was to their left, a steep, brushy range of boulders that spilled away in a wedge downhill; a narrow band of woods played out to their right and gave way to meadow and a broad plain below, curtained close at hand on the left by the ridge.

But out across the plain and under the shadowed sky, all but obscured by the ridge, a keen eye could make out the regularity of cultivated land… it was a moment before Cefwyn was sure what he saw, but once he saw, there was no mistaking it.

It was the cultivated border of a town, its sheep walls and winter brown barley fields. This slope met the end of the cursed ridge that had kept them from joining forces with Tristen and their southern neighbors.

And at the very bottom of the slope, all but obscured by the downward fall of the hill, the massed forces of an army.

Tristen, he thought at first, seeing black banners. But Tasmôrden had claimed the High Kingship; and those lines held nothing of the bright banners that should be with Tristen, nothing of the White Horse of Ivanor, the Heron banner of Lanfarnesse.

No. It was not Tristen.

“He is there!” Cefwyn cried aloud. He had good eyes, better than most, and he pointed for those who might see once they looked. “Tasmôrden’s waiting for us below! We’ve come to Ilefínian, and we’ve met our enemy!’’’’

“Ilefínian!” Anwyll of the Dragons took up the shout. “The gods for Ylesuin!”

“The gods for Ylesuin and the Lady Regent!” Cefwyn shouted back, and loyal men of the Dragons echoed him.

The skirmish over by the woods had surely been a signal, messengers fled back to Tasmôrden, warning of their arrival, a light-armed force that carried word what they were, and in what numbers, and perhaps, essential to one who relied on traitors, word whether Rys-sand’s banner flew among the rest.

It did, and if Tasmôrden’s men had lingered to report how they ordered their line, why, it flew centermost, where he had ordered it to be, foremost of Ylesuin’s defense, after all.

Tristen rode in the world at a steady, ground-consuming pace, with all the south at his back, while the gray space grew violent with lightnings and that black Edge appeared which had appeared at the Lord Regent’s death… so vivid a sight Tristen had difficulty knowing what was the world of Men and what was the other place. Chill wind blew out of that gulf and threatened to sweep them all away into it: at one moment and in the white fire of lightning he felt the whole world tilted and sliding, and yet when he made himself look squarely between Dys’ black ears it was no different than the world had ever been.

“Do you see anything?” he asked those about him, and yet knew it was foolish of him to ask. “Do you feel the cold?”

“The cold, yes, my lord,” Crissand said: Uwen did not answer, but Tristen doubted any Man without the gift had perceived what he saw or felt. He hoped they did not, for the cold was bitter and the view unsettling to the heart… but courage, these Men did have, to face what came.

The town rose before them, veiled by fire-blackened orchards, its gates shut, and more than shut, warded. He felt the strength of it even here, warding that might admit those blind to it, but not him. He sent Owl out, as far as Owl dared go, to try to find a way for him, but Owl turned back suddenly as if he had met a barrier, and suddenly the horses went as if they trod on eggshells, sniffing the wind for what no one could see.

Yet the shadow of a little girl appeared walking before them down that lane of burned orchards… gone for an hour and two and now back again, under the sky laced with lightning and muttering with thunder. Then, with her, hand in hand, Auld Syes appeared, looking like some country wife walking with her little daughter.

“There’s the child,” Crissand said in wonder, as if he could not see the mother. And Cevulirn said nothing, whether he saw or not.

Then Sovrag rode forward, swearing there was winter in the air again, and he had seen sleet on the wind, though the smell in the air was rain and burned wood.

Immediately behind him came old Pelumer, with little fuss, only silently joining them. And last came Umanon on his great destrier, with his guard. They all were to the fore now, all the lords.

“Shall we ride up to the gates and ask politely?” Umanon asked. “Or where is Tasmôrden, do you suppose?”

Umanon asked, and Tristen looked back at the stony ridge that spilled downhill behind them in a tumble of great boulders that ended with abandoned orchards and weed-grown fields, and the question wrung his heart, for after so long and hard marching they had come almost within reach of one another… almost within reach, but not in reach at all, and not within his protection.

There was Tasmôrden, he thought, and forgot to say so, his wits were so distracted with the threat aloft and the threat of the walls before them.

“I see the child,” Uwen remarked in surprise. “Walkin’ wi’ someone, she is.”

The light dimmed as if a dark cloud had gone over the sun, then dimmed further. Tristen looked up at a slate gray pall that streamed over the tops of the charred trees at their left. In the next moment a gale blasted through the trees, tearing the banners sideways, throwing Owl tumbling. Horses turned from the gale and riders fought them back to a steady course as the trees shed a sleet of broken twigs.

Shadows gathered out of that orchard, not the shadows of the overwhelmed sun, but Shadows from out of the depths of ruin, Shadows that flowed like ink in the gust-torn brush, with wafts of cold air. Thunder muttered above them, and lightning sheeting through the clouds whitened the black trees, but did nothing to relieve the flow of darkness seeping from woods and rocks.

“Something’s beside us,” Crissand said anxiously, and cries of dismay arose from behind them.

“Ride,” Tristen said, urging Dys forward, for what swept about them felt to be neither friend nor foe, only the outpouring of magic reaching into dark places and drawing out all the Shadows imprisoned there. He swept them up, urging them also against the walls where the enemy had his citadel.

The heart of all that was wrong was in Ilefínian, and how they should pass its gates, he did not know.

Lightning chained across the sky, setting all that was bright in unnatural clarity against a darkened sky, and thunder cracked above the army’s heads. A warhorse broke the line and charged forward, fighting his rider’s signals, prompting other horses to break forward only to be turned back, and Cefwyn reined Kanwy about to shout at the Dragons to stand fast, no matter the wrath of heaven or the folly of horses.

The trumpeters sounded out loud and long, king’s men, experienced and sensible, calling out for attention; and men heard that, through ears half-deafened by thunder, those who could not hear their king’s voice. The line that had wavered steadied.

Cefwyn rode Kanwys out to the fore, riding across the slope in front of the red ranks of Dragon Guard, the black of the Prince’s, and shouted out, over and over, “The gods for Ylesuin! The gods against sorcery! Gods save Ylesuin!” while the men, encouraged, shouted back,

“The gods for Ylesuin! Gods save the king!”

They had men enough armed, now, and the line was formed. The enemy had not come upslope after them, only prudent; but neither had they taken their greatest opportunity, that moment of confusion in the Saendal’s assault on their flank. If sorcery helped Tasmôrden, in whatever balance it warred with Emuin and Tristen, at least it had not helped Tasmôrden come over that hill in time to catch them unprepared.

Tasmôrden waited instead in the valley, prepared to receive a cavalry charge.

But traps were possible, trenches and stakes and pikemen and other such unpleasant means to turn the charge of heavy cavalry into carnage: for that reason among others Cefwyn would not give the order to rush headlong downhill, letting his troops slip prudence and outrace the trumpet signals and the reach of couriers. He saw with satisfaction that Maudyn had completely crushed the attack from the woods.

And he had recovered his men from the panic charge they might have made. It was harder to go deliberately, to measure their advance, but he relied on his veteran companies, and had sent out messengers sternly advising the line to prepare a moderate advance… gods keep the peasant levies steady.

He gave the signal and led, keeping Kanwy tight-reined. Behind him, the veteran companies that were the stability of Ylesuin’s line held their horses to the pace he set, allowing the peasant line to keep up. He could see the center, Ryssand’s forces; and the right wing, Maudyn’s, stretched out to indistinction against an unkept woods which had already sent out an ambush. They advanced, keeping their ranks, never quickening the charge. It was a game of temptation: Tasmôrden tempted him to a mad rush downhill: he had his own trap in mind.

“They aren’t facing untried boys!” Cefwyn shouted at Anwyll, with the Dragons, where a little too much enthusiasm from Anwyll’s lot crowded up. “Steady pace!”

Ryssand and Nelefreissan and Murandys to the center, the Dragons, Osanan and the Prince’s Guard in the left wing with him, while Maudyn commanded the right wing: Panys and Llymaryn, Carys and the other eastern provinces, with the Guelen Guard, as they had settled among themselves. At the very last, their heavy cavalry had to screen their far fewer pikemen, who would be slow as tomorrow getting to the fray, and in peasant order, which was to say, damned little order at all… likely to arrive only for the very last action if the cavalry once lost its good sense and plunged downslope.

Yet it was always Ylesuin’s habit to have the pikemen for support, and Cefwyn asked himself a last time was it folly on his part to have declined to summon the Guelen and Llymarish levies into this, not to have had the double line of pikes that had distinguished his grandfather’s successful assaults.

It was far too late now for second thoughts. Kanwy fought him for more rein and jolted under him like a mountain in motion, plate-sized feet descending a steep slope in deliberate, uncomfortable strides that made it clear Kanwy wanted to run.

For a guard at his back he had those who had defended him for years; and for a man at his right he had young Anwyll, lately from watch on the Lenúalim.

Where are you now, master crow? Taking account of this? On the ridge watching?

I know where all my enemies are. I’ve dealt with it, thank you, faithful crow. I could use your shield just now. Anwyll’s a fine young man. But he hasn’t your qualities.

The horizon flashed white, then dark, and the foot of the hill gave up a sudden movement of dark banners with a white device that shone like the lightning itself.

It was the heraldry of the Sihhë High Kings carried before him, in the lines of the enemy, the black banner of the Tower Crowned.

And before Ylesuin’s line, beside the red Dragon Banner of the Marhanen kings, shone the Tower and Checker of the Lady Regent, blue and white and gold, bright under the leaden sky.

“Hold!” Cefwyn said, and reined in, to allow his line to assume a better order: the wings had begun to stray a little behind. “Let’s see if they’ll climb to us!”

The line drew to a ragged stop, re-formed itself in an even, bristling row of lances.

He sorely missed the Lanfarnessemen, archers that would have taken full advantage of this height. From the right wing issued a thin gray sleet of arrows aloft, archers from Panys’ contingent, the best they had, and likely to do damage with the higher vantage.

Back came a flight from the other direction, uphill and short, a waste of shafts.

A solitary horseman rode out from the halted opposing line, rode back and forth, shouting something in which Cefwyn had no interest at all, except the mild hope that an arrow would do them a favor.

There, he said to himself, seeing the glint of gold encircling that helm, there was Tasmôrden at last, taunting them, wishing the king of Ylesuin to descend into the trap he had laid.

He would not shout back, would not give way to anger. He set Kanwy out to the fore at a mere amble, rode across the center and rode back again, gesture for gesture, leisurely as a ride through his capital. Arrows attempted the uphill shot with no better effect than before. Arrows came back down the hill, and the dull thump of impact below echoed off the rocks to their left, with satisfying outcries of anger from the enemy below.

In the same leisure Cefwyn rejoined his wing, rode to Anwyll’s side, and pointed to a stand of brush somewhat past Tasmôrden’s line. “When we do charge, we will meet Lord Maudyn there, behind his line. Bear somewhat left. We shan’t be in a hurry until the last.”

“Left, Your Majesty…”

“Left, I say. Out and around his flank. There may be trenches. But there we meet Lord Maudyn, and come back east again. No driving into Tasmôrden’s center, where I most think he’s fortified. That honor is Ryssand’s.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” There was grave doubt in Anwyll’s voice.

“Relay that to Captain Gwywyn.”

Anwyll rode off at a good clip, met with the captain of the Prince’s Guard, who stood in Idrys’ place in general command of the king’s forces, and came back again in haste toward him, to take his place as shieldman.

“Sound the advance!” Cefwyn cried to the trumpeter, and as the trumpets sounded, gave Kanwy rein to resume a measured advance.

Only when he was close enough to the foot of the long descent did he let the pace increase, and set himself not in the lead, as he had done in other wars, but back with the line: his guard was around him, the Dragons beside him, and the forest of ash wood lifted at the heavens now began to lower as the ranks closed.

He lowered his own visor, lowered the lance, took a good grip for the shock to come; and hoped to the gods the veteran Dragons evaded the brush where he wagered stakes were in place: they were too expert for such traps.

And his leading was not to ride full tilt into the lines that offered; they evaded the rows of brush that skirted the center and met the shock of heavy horse that swept out from the enemy’s line to prevent that flanking move—met it with a crack like a smith’s hammer. Horses went down, fewer of theirs than the enemy’s, and they slid by—doing nothing to attack the entrenched line of brush-hidden stakes and pikemen. They went past the flank of the cavalry, and the heavy horse of Tasmôrden’s center, seeing the gap they had left, charged past them, going uphill, unchecked.

Ryssand had buckled, had retreated.

And Tasmôrden’s riders plunged up and up into that pocket of retreating men, blind to the sweep from either wing that now turned behind them.

Cefwyn took down an opposing pikeman with the broken stub of his lance, sent Kanwy through a last curtain of infantry, and saw Maudyn’s banners coming toward him from the east, to meet him behind Tasmôrden’s line.

More, he saw Tasmôrden’s banners in the heart of the remaining pikemen, and saw the cluster of mounted heavy horse guards that betokened a lord’s defense, between him and Maudyn.

“With me!” he shouted at Anwyll and whatever of his own guard could keep up, and, sword in hand, he rode for that gold-crowned man in the heart of the enemy.

The pretender to the High Kingship failed to see his approach; he shouted in vain after his charging troops, who by now had chased halfway up the hill in pursuit of Ryssand’s retreat.

“Tasmôrden!” Cefwyn shouted, and the man turned his face toward him, a dark-bearded man in a crowned helm, in black armor, bearing the forbidden Tower Crowned on his coat and his shield.

Kanwy went through the guard like a bludgeon, scattering unready pikemen, shouldering horses aside as Cefwyn laid about him with sword and shield; with a shove of his hindquarters as if he were climbing a hill, Kanwy broke through the last screen of defense, trampled a man, kept going. The clangor of engagement was at Cef-wyn’s back: his guard was still with him, shouting for the gods and Ylesuin; and the crowned man, realizing his danger, reined full about and swept a wild blow at Cefwyn’s head.

Cefwyn angled his shield, shed the force of it, and dealt a blow past the opposing shield. Kanwy shouldered a horse that hit them hard, bit another. Cefwyn cut aside at the encroaching guard, veered

Kanwy full about as he bore, in time to intercept another of Tasmôrden’s attacks, this one descending at Kanwy’s neck.

The sword grated past the metal-guarded edge of his shield, scored Kanwy’s shoulder. Kanwy stumbled, recovered himself against another horse, and blows cracked like thunder around them. One numbed Cefwyn’s back, but as Kanwy regained solid footing he had Tasmôrden in sight and drove his heels in, sending Kanwy over a fallen rider and through the mistimed defense of two pikemen who tried to prevent him. A pike grated off Kanwy’s armor. A man cried out and went down and Kanwy bore him past, and up against his enemy.

Tasmôrden flung up his shield, desperately choosing defense: but Cefwyn’s strike came from the side, with Kanwy’s impetus behind it on a wheeling turn. The blade hit and hung, needing force and a twist of the arm to free it, and when Cefwyn freed the blade, Tasmôrden toppled from his saddle, helmless, a black-bearded and bloody face disappearing down into a maelstrom of horses and men.

“Majesty!” Cefwyn heard a man shout, and saw Lord Maudyn across an ebbing rush of Tasmôrden’s forces.

Suddenly the air thickened. The hairs of his head and Kanwy’s mane alike stood up.

Wizard-work, he thought. A trap.

And force and light and sound burst from the heart of the enemy.

Lightning broke above the towers, ripped across the sky, and even at a distance the air shivered with it. “Gods bless!” Uwen said, yet to Tristen’s knowledge not a man behind them turned back.

The child and the Lady still went before them, and still that inky flow ran along the edges of the woods, but the lightning flash had for the blink of an eye seemed to illumine men and horses, gray as morning mist, that moved where the darkness flowed.

“I see men,” Crissand said, while above them and near at hand the towers of Ilefínian now seemed to flow with inky stain in the cracks and crevices. The darkness flowed, too, in the ditch beside the road, and between the stones of a ruined sheep wall. It wound itself among the thin, straggling branches of blackened, bare trees, and drifted down like falling leaves, to coalesce and run like dark fire along the ground.

It became footprints, and the next flicker of the heavens showed ghostly riders in greater numbers.

“Haunts,” Sovrag said, and Umanon blessed himself. Ahead of them all moved the lady of Emwy, but now it seemed banners had joined theirs, banners in great numbers, and a handful of ghostly gray riders, heedless of the trees, paced beside them toward the looming gates.

“Lord Haurydd,” Aeself said in a muted voice, and Tristen, too, recognized the man and the banners, dim as he was under the flickering heavens. The walls of the town seemed manned, but it was uncertain whether with living Men or Shadows.

Behind his banners, the Elwynim, the Lady’s sparrows, had come to take back their town; and the south of Ylesuin had come to defend their land against Elwynor’s wars of succession.

Tristen turned in the saddle and looked back over the host that had come to this place, men who had left their own lands for a comfortless camp and the risk of sorcery out of the stones of walls that had known too many wars. The earth itself seemed to quake, and the gray place held no comfort.

—At my very doors, the Wind whispered. Mauryl’s precious hatchling. Have we known one another at some time, disagreed, perhaps?

He swung about. It was not only that voice. There was another presence, far more familiar, that drifted around the perimeter, one that taunted and mocked him and still dared not come close.

He recalled the courtyard at Ynefel, and Mauryl’s face within its walls, as all the others had been imprisoned, all the lost, all the defeated.

So might Ilefínian stand, as haunted, as wretched in its fall.

“The gates are barred,” he said to Uwen, for the Wind told him so.

—Ylesuin’s down, it said. Folly. Great folly. Will you help him, I wonder?

In the unstable clouds of the gray space he saw a field where lightning had struck, and the dead lay all about, men and horses, and Cefwyn… yet alive, within reach of him, if only he reached out to rescue him.

He turned his head suddenly and looked up at the walls, seeing the lure it cast him, its intention to have Cefwyn’s life and his as surely as he turned that direction, and he would not do as it wished.

He struck at all of its presence he could reach within the gray space, he struck desperately and hard, and failed. His hold on the world weakened. His strength ebbed. It was the wards that drank it away from him.

“Uwen,” he said, “I have to go in there. I have to open the gates.”

“Not alone,” Crissand said. “No, my lord!”

There was no debate. The way was plain to him for an instant, the blink of an eye, and he cast himself into it, alone, knowing only that there was within the fortress of Ilefínian a room where a banner had hung.

And that his enemy, bent on destruction of all he loved, invited him.

Lightning had hit, and only the fact he remembered that told Cefwyn that he had survived. He remembered Kanwy falling sidelong and pitching him to shield-side. He recalled the impact on his shield against a carpet of metal-clad bodies, and after that was uncertain whether Kanwy had risen or not: all the world was a noise in his ears and a blinding light in his vision, so bright it might have been dark instead.

He lay an instant winded and uncertain whether he felt the sword in his hand or whether it was, like the fall, only the vivid memory of holding it.

But his knee moved, and his elbow held him off his face.

And if he would live, his father had dinned it into him, no matter how hard the fall, no matter the pain, if Ylesuin would survive, he had no choice but cover himself and find his guards and his horse.

He gained one knee, levered himself to his feet with his sword, proving he did indeed hold it. He stumbled erect into a blind confusion of wounded men and horses, a morass of tangled bodies and shattered lances that turned and shifted underfoot, to a second fall and a third.

A distance along, his eyes began to make out moving shadows, but he thought others must be as dazed by the bolt. No one attacked him, no one seemed aware of any color or banner, and he had no idea at the moment where the lines were. He had lost his helm, his shield was in two pieces, and he shed it as an encumbrance, staggering on uneven ground, but aware at last that downhill was not the direction of his own men.

In front of him a fallen horse raised itself on its hindquarters and began to gain its feet, like a moving hill rearing up before him: his gloved hand found its shoulder and its neck and he seized the reins and tried to hold the stirrup, but the dazed horse tore away from him and veered off on its own way across the field, trampling the dead and the dying in its course.

Damn, Cefwyn said to himself, holding an aching side and recovering with difficulty from the blow the horse had dealt him. A second time brought to a standstill and having no other sense to help him, he listened past the roaring in his ears, trying to make of the sounds he heard any known voice, any sign of his own guards or any surety of his enemies. Men moved and called to one another near him, voices lifted over the distant clangor of battle, but his ears could not distinguish the words from sounds that might be wind or thunder.

It was a predicament, beyond a doubt, and he felt his father’s disapproval of all he had done. Headlong folly had set him here afoot and alone.

But by the good gods, the battle plan had seemed to work. On a deep breath he recalled the successful sweep of two wings around Tasmôrden’s flanks, while Tasmôrden’s center charged uphill and Tasmôrden cursed his own men helplessly from the bottom of the hill.

Now he recalled the encounter with Tasmôrden. Now he recalled that he had come within sight of Ilefínian, and remembered that the enemy no longer had any semblance of a king or a leader. Orders would no longer come to them. Captains must direct such fighting as remained, and for hired captains, there was no more source of gold, no reason to linger.

But then another realization came to him… that in the bolt that had overthrown him and obscured Tasmôrden’s fall, there was no coincidence—none he accepted since he had stood on Lewen field—none, since he had claimed Tristen for a friend. The hand of wizardry was beyond a doubt in that bolt, and he was still alive— inconvenienced mightily, afoot, half-deaf and three-quarters blind, but alive, while Tasmôrden was lying somewhere below.

He could in no wise say whether it was his wizards or Tasmôrden’s who had just set the heavens afire and brought down the hammer of heaven on the battle with Tasmôrden, but they had called the lightning on the Quinaltine roof, and he began to suspect the answer lay in a wizardous tug of war.

Yet whatever magic had aimed or pulled the bolt this way or that, it had not hit him, and in that fact, he saw Tristen’s hand.

He paused in that astonished thought, gazing toward the town his hazed vision could no longer find. At least he had seen it before the lightning fell… all his promise to Ninévrisë, all the ambition of his grandfather, all wrapped in one. That, and his enemy.

But if it was folly to have charged after Tasmôrden himself, it was greater folly to stand gawping in the middle of the carnage. He could not find a horse, or his guards: he began to realize he would not find either wandering here. From the mere effort to see, his eyes streamed tears. His very bones ached, his skin felt the first instant of scalding, endlessly maintained, and he doubted any man in the vicinity of the lightning could have fared much better. He recalled a field of dead men where he had waked, and told himself he had used all the luck that wizardry had parceled out to him on this field: he could not count on it twice.

And if downhill was the direction of Ilefínian, then he recalled the lay of the land, the spill of boulders that curved down to the flat where he had engaged Tasmôrden. That had been on the right: he knew by that which direction was east and west, where Tasmôrden’s men had been tending; and knew now where he might find a place against which to set his back and live long enough to regain clear sight.

Determined, then, he went toward the west, where the ridge advanced outcrops of rounded stone and brush, and went unchallenged except by one wounded man nearly as blind. They hacked at one another, neither with great success, and blundered by, both shaken, both content to escape, the common soldier having no notion, perhaps, that he had engaged the king of Ylesuin.

His dazed wits wandered: he had caught buffets like that from his father in his day: had sat down with one ear near deaf in the practice yard. He was confused from moment to moment whether it was the practice yard or the battlefield, but after that encounter his ears began to make out sounds that informed him it was no practice, and when he reached a haze of gray winter brush and crashed against a sizable boulder, he was content only to sink down beside it and catch his breath.

Sight began to come to him, alternate with dark.

Uphill, his banners and Ninévrisë’s still flew. Uphill, a band of moving red had swept around the blue ranks of the Elwynim.

It was his design. Ryssand’s retreat had done exactly what he had hoped it would, and the Dragons had not perished in the lightning: they had lived, and charged back uphill. Ryssand in his compact with his Elwynim allies had started a panic retreat in his center, intending the army to break apart in confusion… but Cefwyn rejoiced to know his own plan had driven the wings both full tilt downhill instead, downhill and around, while Tasmôrden’s men had chased uphill into the pocket Ryssand gave them… breaking their line, losing contact with their own wings: too much confidence, too fast an advance. They had chased their own ally’s retreat between Ylesuin’s left wing and right, sure they had won the encounter down to the moment the jaws closed.

And Tasmôrden, who had let his troops slip his hand, could only stand behind them and curse, seeing disaster none of his men on the hill had been able to see.

Now the remnant of Tasmôrden’s center was caught in a tightening noose, for surely in desperation, Ryssand’s peasant muster had held its line better than the cavalry that had deliberately started the rout, and now the Dragons and the men of Panys, coming uphill, had the Elwynim in a bottle from which there was no escape.

And gods knew whether Maudyn was alive, or Gwywyn, or who of all them was giving orders up there. Gods forfend it was Ryssand… who might just have assumed the crown was within his grasp.

On that thought, Cefwyn staggered away from the rocks that had upheld him, began to climb the hill to reach his troops, picking his way past the dead and wounded at the edge of the brush and the rocks and finding this part of the hill woefully steeper on the climb up than it had ever seemed going down it.

CHAPTER 7

The clouds of the gray space flickered with lightning the same as the clouds of the world, but it was not only the sight of the clouds that chilled Tristen’s heart: it was the sight of the Edge, over which a cataract of cloud roared and vanished, endlessly.

—Come inside, the Wind said, a mere thickening in that stream… a curl amidst the cloud.

And in the blink of an eye and half without his will Tristen found himself indeed inside Ilefínian, inside its fortress, within that room where the banner had hung.

More, Crissand was at his back, and four archers confronted them with bows bent.

He stepped back to escape. Then he realized a trap indeed, for the escape at his back instantly seemed to be the old mews. That former retreat was the path his thoughts most easily held and that was the path that his own will by mischance opened, not only to them, but to the enemy.

“Get to safety!” he wished Crissand, for they both stood within the mews. He felt Emuin’s startled presence, and Ninévrisë’s, almost within hail of his voice. He turned to remake the wards, as a vast Shadow poured after them.

The wards held against it, but a lesser Shadow slipped past to find its master a way in, through wards it well knew: Shadows waked within the Zeide’s walls as the ragged remnant that was Hasufin breached the new defenses: a shriek ran through its stones as if iron bent, and a rumbling resounded through its vaults as if stones moved. A crack raced up the several chimneys of the tower.

Tristen knew his ground and held it against all distraction: he had Crissand beside him, and the mews for the moment sealed itself fast, walling out the attack that came from Ilefínian’s heart.

But their enemy’s servant raged on in his own search. It was still the child Hasufin sought, and as Tristen reached to prevent him, he realized the child was not with Tarien: Ninévrisë had Elfwyn, had seized him in her arms at the first alarm from the mews and held him fast.

The Shadow in the burned cell clawed at the stones, flowed between them into every crevice of her prison, frantic in her search for a way out of the wards, trying to find the least small crack that might open. In the shriek of iron and the echoes of the deep vaults she called to Tarien Aswydd as the smell of fire tainted the gray space… Sister, sister, my twin, my other self… call me out! Call me out of this prison… aetheling, aetheling as we are, queens of this land, sister… is that not the dream? Can you forget?

It was a bond more magical than wizardous that extended through the stones, cords of a sister’s anger and a mother’s yearning that plunged Tarien’s head into her hands, knotted her fingers into her hair, and sent a silent cry of anguish through the stones, for in the moment of choice, it was Ninévrisë she upheld, not her sister. It was Ninévrisë who had taken her child and Orien who had governed all her life… and the moment she denied Orien’s voice the shock went through the gray space, a wail resounding through the stones.

—Stand fast! Tristen urged Ninévrisë.

Allies embraced, rooms apart. Two women held close, Tarien’s eyes shut tight, heart clenched tight about the child she ached to have in her arms again, the infant that Ninévrisë promised, protected, warded for her with all her strength.

Above, in the tower, the crack in the chimney jolted wider and Emuin’s shutters flew open: a draft howled from the lower hall to the tower height, and Paisi, his arms full of parchments, dived beneath a table at Emuin’s feet, striving to keep the wind from tearing the charts all away.

All of this happened in a heartbeat… all the fortress leapt in one instant into clarity, as blindingly swift as the Shadow seeking that reciprocal crack within the wards.

With another jolt the crack in the wall raced downward, opened across the ceilings of the lower floor and let a winter-cold gale blow into the old mews.

Beneath a horn-paned window, beneath a rough sill in Ynefel’s upper tier, ruin had begun from a single crack. The stones had fallen, beginning from there, until Ynefel stood in ruins, overthrown.

So Althalen had gone down in blackened timbers, stones fallen, the Lines sleeping and broken.

Until, until, Tristen thought fiercely, Lord Uleman had held it for his court. Next Auld Syes’ sparrows had spread their tents there, reclaiming it for the living. Aeself’s battered folk, lasting through the bitter snows, had raised a wooden tower that creaked and swayed in the winds. The scattered sparrows had built themselves a shelter that, though it leaked in the rains and admitted every draft—yet was home.

So Althalen had risen from the ashes. Wind there scoured the stones, flattening the grass that grew where the palace once had stood; above it all the wooden tower stood, Aeself’s work, where lightning threatened and wind tore at the sheltering canvas… the women who held that post cried out in terror of the storm, and the tower quaked and swayed, but Tristen willed Aeself’s tower to stand against the wind. With a sweep of his arm he willed the lightning away: it was his land, his lordship, and if he gave it to Crissand, still, he warded it against the enemy. He willed all who were in the place safe, and bade that tower stand.

Owl flew past, a brown streak, and wheeled away on a gust, a skirl of dust that, out of the grass of the ruins of Althalen, became the shape of a man… bits of grass and dust formed all the substance that Hasufin Heltain could command now. He had failed his master, failed his bid for the child. The man of dust had reached after Owl, but fell asunder, no more at last than dust and chaff.

Tristen lifted his hand to recover Owl, who lighted on his arm as lightning chained across the heavens.

He stood in Ynefel, amid shattered timbers, the ruin of all the wonderful stairways that had run like spiderwebs up and up to the loft.

He stood in the courtyard, where Hasufin had been the haunt.

But not the only one.

Dust and leaves blew across the pavings, encountered the cracked wall… and fell, a mere scattering of pieces. Hasufin could not return, not now. His strength was spent.

But the Wind came stealing softly through the open gate. Or had done. Time was always uncertain here, and the Wind came and went unpredictably, like Ynefel’s other visitors.

—Well, well, well, said the Wind, here, too, brave prince of Shadows.

—Still here, Tristen said in the foreboding hush.

—But not there, are you? Not in that land where your allies need you… are you, Lord of Ghosts?

Fear touched his heart, fear for Crissand, and for the army he had left to others’ leading—but he was not, as Emuin called him, a fool, to glance aside and distract himself with his enemy’s chatter. He kept one thing in mind, and the threats and the gusts could not shake him.

—Can I not? Can you not fear me? Others do.

He suddenly had that feeling he had had of nights when Orien’s dragons loomed above his bed: and at once he was flung into the gray space in a swirl of cloud. The Wind wrapped about him like a cloak and spun about and about and down.

It left him facing the Edge, where cloud poured like rain down a roof.

—Look in, it said. Do you dare?

And without his bending at all the Edge seemed to open before him. He stared into a dark that reflected shadows and light, and was the image in a rain barrel, no more than that.

It was his own image it cast back, all dark hair and shadow, with the sun at his back, as he had seen himself when first he tried to know his own face.

He drew back in the instant the Wind sought to push him over the Edge. He turned, sword in hand, and faced it with the question he himself had wished to answer:

—Who are you? Do you know? Do you dare look at your own reflection?

I dare. A Shape formed itself out of cloud, a young man, mist for a cloak, storm for raiment, and shifting haze for armor. It was a mirror of himself, of Crissand, but neither shadow nor sun: a nameless Shaping of grays and magic, out of its seething clouds of the gray space.

And the challenge it posed was magic, a power breaking free of all law that had ever constrained it, all the wizard-work, all the Lines on the earth, all the bindings ever bound. It breathed in, and on its next breath it might carry all the world away.

And the weapon to counter it was not alone the sword and its spells: it was even more than the Lines of Ynefel’s wards, or the Zeide’s, or Althalen’s, or any barrier of stone laid down in the world: it was all the work of all the wizards and all the Men that had lived their lives in constraint of power and the habit of order.

The Wind gathered force, and gathered force, all for one great effort… it Summoned all who had ever fallen to its lure, all who

had ever gone deep within its embrace and lost themselves, not alone Hasufin Heltain, not alone Orien, or Heryn Aswydd or the hundreds of others without name. It lacked Shape, so it cloaked itself in his likeness, all grays, living magic, the third force, balanced between Shadow and Sun.

—Barrakketh, it whispered, but he would not own that name.

—I know you, it said, as Hasufin had said, but he would not be limited by what it knew.

Instead he recalled an age of watching the suns above the ice, raising the stones of a great, solid fortress to hold the Lines of the World against the ceaseless change of magic.

He recalled the gathering of those who could answer a wizard’s call when it came, for a barrier was breached. The unthinkable had happened. Time itself circled around and around that moment, around those few who could keep the gray space in check.

—Five who failed, the Wind taunted him: it was a willful creature, and destroyed without a thought: it changed and made change: that was what magic did. It slid, and shifted, like a step on ice.

—You can only reflect me, he answered it, the untaught truth, for it had Shaped itself in the image of all it knew, all it saw outside the gray void where it existed… it was the changing mirror of all it met: the Book had said these things. That was the dark secret, the one that would not Unfold to him. He saw the gray force, the middle one, the force in the breach.

—Hasufin wanted that knowledge so, mused the Wind. He wanted that Book to know what he had done. He thought there was a way to bind me. He was mistaken. The Sihhë failed. He was doomed.

—No, Tristen said, for in a leap of fear he saw the danger it posed in its accommodation to his Shape: it reasoned in his own voice and he had begun to listen to it. In its gray reflection of himself he saw the chance to learn more and more and more of what he was, and to find what the Shape withheld from him.

But it would gather him in if he listened to it. Yes, it would answer the questions. It would mirror all the world, and bring all his desires within his reach, all encompassed, all answered, all perfect, and complete.

But the world he loved was less orderly, less perfect.

The world he loved defied him and caused him grief, and contained the warmth of the Sun and the voices of friends. It held the smell of rain, the taste of honey, and the softness of feathers.

A throng of foolish birds, a scramble after bread crumbs.

Owl’s nip at his finger.

Emuin’s frown. Crissand’s smile. Cefwyn’s wry laughter.

—No, he said a second time, shaking his head. And, No, a third time, and with a sweep of the sword he drew a burning Line between Truth and Illusion.

He stood in the pouring rain on the parapets of Ynefel in the next beat of his heart. The Wind rushed over the walls at him, edged with bitter cold, and tried to hurl him down.

He Called the wards of Ynefel and they sprang up in light… the Lines not only of the fortress, but Lines alight all through Marna Wood, all along the old Road, all along the river shore: Galasien’s Lines rose to life, and Lines spun out and out through the woods, the shape in light of the ancient city, recalling what had been, what could not now be.

“Crissand!” Tristen cried, realizing the danger of that slide backward. He hurled himself into the gray space, to go back to all that he had left at risk… but his attempt careened off into the winds. He Called further: now Althalen’s wards leapt up, and the blue of the Lines rose up and raced on and on across the land.

At Henas’amef, the Zeide flared bright as a winter moon, and all the Lines of the town and its walls leapt to life. The light of Lines raced along outward roads like dew on a spiderweb, touched villages, touched Modeyneth. Light ran along the foundations of the Wall that Drusenan had raised. Blue fire touched Anwyll’s camp, and raced along the bridge, and across the river to the camp, and on to the trail of the army, through woods and meadows.

He had no Place, and had every Place. The lightning chained about him, and the light of the gray place ran along his hand and into the tracery of silver on his sword. He had no wish to do harm. He had no wish to end his existence.

—Pride, pride, pride, the Wind mocked him. It was certainly Mauryl’s undoing. So do you inherit his mantle, Shaping? You think you can keep me out?

—You invited me in, he reminded the Wind. I hold you to that.

It disliked that. It strengthened its wards against him. And for the second time the Wind gathered Shape, reflecting him, as if a young man wrapped himself in a cloak of shifting shadow, and glanced mockingly over his shoulder.

—Do you like what you see, Mauryl’s creature? Question, question, question everyone, but never the best question… what are you? Mauryl’s creature? Mauryl’s maker? Come, be brave, ask yourself that question. I’ll give you this: we aren’t that different, you and I.

He could never resist questions. Questions led him, distracted him, carried him through the world forgetful of his own substance and fearful of what he might find.

But among those questions he remembered the fabric of that cloak… a roiling of shadow and smoke beyond a railing. Then he asked a different, unasked question: why now? Why not Lewenbrook? Why come through Hasufin, until now?

Then he knew what had changed since Lewenbrook. Then he was sure whence it had come… not out of Ilefínian, where it had now taken hold: but it was never lord there in the Lord Regent’s domain. The breach had come elsewhere, magic breaking forth from a tangled maze of shadows, repeated attempts to ward it in.

Lines built upon and rebuilt, until its ally sent the lightning down… confounding the Lines that Men had built, breaking a small gap wider. Ilefínian was the second step.

And he had redrawn that Line… there! Tristen said to himself, and with a thought carried himself to the ward he had traced on the stones of the Quinaltine shrine.

Here he engaged his enemy, and here he brought the new Line up in brilliant light, in a place of chanting and incense, and sudden consternation.

“Gods!” Efanor cried, armed and armored, amid guards and priests as he faced the intrusion on his long watch. “Amefel!”

“Stand fast!” Tristen said, for the gray space broke forward, rushed at the Line: and when it could not cross that barrier on the new stones, spilled upward like smoke, spiraling up to the rafters. The Wind tugged at the heraldic banners between the columns, rising up and up toward the gap that had once been there, a mended gap that suddenly and with a rending of timbers opened to the sky.

“Amefel!” Efanor cried as timbers crashed like thunder among the benches, splintering wood, resounding on stone. “What’s happened? Are we lost?”

“Not yet!” Tristen wheeled the sword about, struck a clanging blow to the Line on the stones, and called the Shadows up and up, until blue fire leapt from the blade to the rafters. Shadows rushed into that breach in the roof, a rift in the wards that had let the gray space rip wide, a Line straight to Ilefínian’s unprotected heart.

Owl made a swift passage behind the columns about the shrine, routing a last few Shadows, and rose up, up on the draft.

“Stand fast!” Tristen asked of Efanor, and hurled himself through the gray space, seeking to breach the wards the enemy had made.

But the mews began to remake itself about him, glowing with blue light, row on row of perches, Shadows that raised ominous wings and battered the air, defying him, defying the Lines that now existed, ready to rend and destroy.

But Emuin, besieged in his tower, wind-battered, waved a bony arm and wished him on his way north, as Men measured the heavens.

“The Year of Years, young lord! This age is yours! You, young lord, you claim it! Do as you must! Go!”

A flock of birds started up at his passage, wings brushing the gray space: his frail, silly companions of lost hours… he was startled by their rise into the mews, and seeing them so frail and foolish against the Shadows, he spread his magic wide to protect them on the wing: he wished them up, and through all hazard—for a way out was what they sought.

The winged ghosts of the mews rushed up as well, but his flock turned in a wide sweep, wings flashing against the roiling dark, by his wish evading the killers. Owl rushed by like a mad thing, losing feathers, himself nearly prey.

—Fly, he wished Owl. And Crissand. And Cefwyn, and all the wizards of Men who had ever drawn a Line against this thing. He followed Owl, tried to thread the needle through the wards of Ilefmnian… and found himself instead flung to the Edge with his back to the brink.

The mirror-youth faced him, the gray space flashing with storm.

Tristen stood fast, going neither forward nor back, calling the light of the gray space into his sword until the silver on the blade burned blinding bright. Truth, one side said, and Illusion, the other, and the line between the two he aimed at the heart of his enemy.

—Shaping of Mauryl, it taunted his defense. Bind me, you upstart? Banish me, do you think? Go back into the dark, foolish Shaping, until you learn my name!

—For him I bind you, Lord of Magic! For Mauryl! And for Hasufin, when he was Mauryl’s friend!

The Wind roared over him, an outraged wall of gray, and the force that attempted to form about him, to Shape itself about his shape, sundered itself on the sword’s edge, and lost all form. He could not see its fall, or if it fell, but behind him there was nothing but the Edge.

… or the reflection in the rain barrel.

… or the endless rush of wind and cloud into the void.

The wards it had woven, threads stretched from the Quinaltine and wound about Ilefínian… collapsed like a wall going down.

“M’lord,” he heard from a great distance. “M’lord, we could truly use your help, if ye hear me.”

Thunder cracked. He stood in that hall in Ilefínian with Crissand at his side, and the archers loosed arrows as Crissand gave a wild cry and charged them… battered them with shield and sword all the way to the door, where Crissand stood, sword in hand, glancing out into the hall.

Then back. “Which way?” Crissand asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Tristen said in astonishment, feeling that time had one certain direction now, and that it moved indeed as he willed it. His knees felt apt to give way; and he took two steps, helpless as a child and apt to faint, except he had the echo of Uwen’s voice ringing in his ears: it seemed to him now that Uwen had been calling for some time.

Crissand meanwhile had two shafts hanging from the bright sun on his shield and a lively challenge shone in his eyes. Between two heartbeats, it might have been, the loosing of an arrow and its strike.

“Downstairs,” Tristen said, remembering the town gates that lay far downhill of the fortress, and suddenly knowing the limits of flesh and bone—that they could not gain the gates by wishing themselves there.

“More are coming,” Crissand said at a racket of footsteps on some distant stairs. “Shall we hold here a bit?”

Lord of Althalen, he was, Tristen said to himself. Lord Sihhë he accepted to be.

“Owl!” he called.

Out of thin air and the stones of the wall, Owl flew, and flew past Crissand, out the door.

Where Owl flew, there Tristen knew he should go. Strength came back to his limbs. He settled his grip on his sword, and heard, distantly, not the crash of thunder, but the boom of something battering the doors downstairs.

Sweat ran beneath the helm and streamed into Cefwyn’s eyes as he climbed the hill that had been a long, long slope down. The fighting on the hill above him swam in a blur of red mingled with that pale blue that always in his thoughts was Ninévrisë’s.

The black banner no longer flew. He was sure of that. He thought that that was indeed Ninévrisë’s standard up there with the Marhanen Dragon… but he could not be sure; and to lose the battle now, for want of officers up on that hill, that possibility, he refused to bear: to see Ryssand escape him, he refused; and he drove himself despite the haze of his vision and the ache in his bones.

Black coat on a rider that turned his way: Tasmôrden’s man, he thought in alarm, but black was the color of the Prince’s Guard as well; and with a pass of a bloody glove across his eyes he confirmed that it was one of his own who had seen him, one of his own who turned toward him, across the corpse-littered field.

More, he knew that blaze-faced horse: it was Captain Gwywyn who came riding in his direction, leaving the battle above, and the fact that Gwywyn came personally reassured him that loyal officers were indeed in command up there, that the fighting was all but done.

With a great relief, then, Cefwyn climbed, using the rocks to help him on his right, though Gwywyn’s horse gained ground downslope far faster than made his weak effort climbing at all worthwhile. Gwywyn quickened his pace… then reined back hard, in inexplicable alarm, gazing up.

Cefwyn turned as with a grate and a scrape of stone and metal a heavy weight slid down from the rocks… a man landed afoot in front of him as Cefwyn lifted his sword in defense: an armored man in black, and likewise armed, and familiar of countenance.

“Master crow?” Cefwyn said, forcing his unused voice. “Damn you, you’re late!”

“If my lord king hadn’t led me a damned downhill chase,” Idrys retorted, “I’d have been in better time.” A glance gestured back toward Gwywyn, who, Cefwyn saw, had come to a baffled standstill. “That, my lord king, is no rescue.”

“Gwywyn?” Cefwyn blinked and saw in Gwywyn’s bearing and in Gwywyn’s unsheathed sword suddenly not his defense, but a threat, the substance of Idrys’ warning of some nights past… Gwywyn: his father’s Lord Commander, his father’s right-hand man. And if Gwywyn had turned traitor… or if Gwywyn had always been Ryssand’s… the three of them were far enough from the rest of the army that no one up there might hear or see what happened in these rocks.

Why should Gwywyn pause? Indeed, why should Gwywyn have doubts in approaching his king, seeing the Lord Commander?

Then Cefwyn saw a reason for Gwywyn to wait, for from the side of the slope nearest the ridge appeared two more men. Corswyndam was one.

“Ryssand,” Cefwyn said, with a longing to have his hands on that throat, and a fear that he might not have the chance. “Have you help, crow? We may need it.”

“I saw from the heights,” Idrys said. “And could not reach that far. But men of mine are aware of him.”

“Aware of him!” Cefwyn cried in indignation. “They daren’t see either of us leave this field alive!”

“Gwywyn did seem likeliest as a traitor,” Idrys said. “I wasn’t wrong.”

“You might have told me!”

“I had my eye on him.”

“Your eye on him, damn you! How long have you known?”

“That he was Ryssand’s man? Messages went astray, such as only a handful knew. Lord Tristen informed me of several instances… whence I deemed it a matter of some haste to reach my lord king—and not to make myself evident to the traitors at the same time. I had no evidence.”

“No evidence!”

“No more sufficient than had my lord king, since my lord was clearly still temporizing with Ryssand. I spied over the situation. I was never far.—Her Grace, by the by, is well situated in Amefel and sends her love.”

“Gods bless!” He was all but breathless, stung to life by the thought of Ninévrisë and unbearably angry at the prospect of dying on this hill, nearly in possession of all he dreamed to have. “Could you not have told me you suspected Gwywyn?”

“I also suspected the captain of the Guelens… who does seem innocent. I’d not ask my lord king’s good temper to face one more known traitor in his councils. The half dozen my lord king already knew about seemed sufficient to suggest caution… and I consulted with men of mine, each night. They have their own orders: if Ryssand retreated, he was not to leave this battle.”

“That is Ryssand, crow. He’s left the battle! Where are these men of yours?”

“Uphill, doubtless, where my lord king should be, except he chased downhill and engaged in combat, scattering my men behind him… ‘ware, my lord! They’re about to charge.”

Gwywyn had joined Corswyndam now, and they came ahead: three scoundrels, Cefwyn thought, regretting his shield. He took a solid grip on his sword and reckoned the threat of Ryssand’s horse, which was not Kanwy’s equal: a heavy-footed, bow-nosed creature he liked no better than its master.

“What was the lightning down there, by the by?” Idrys asked him. “Wizard-work?”

“Hell receiving Tasmôrden,” Cefwyn said with a deep breath. For a moment he felt scant of wind, felt the ache in his arms, and then found his spirits rising, for his shieldman was beside him, and that was the most help he had had in days. “I give you your pick, crow.”

“I’ll take my own traitor, then, and my lord king can have his.”

“Done.”

Lances lowered. Horses gathered speed.

There was a difficulty in attempting to run through wary opponents, ones who had seen wars before this one, and who had their backs against a barrier neither horses nor lances could pass. Cefwyn waited, waited, and he and Idrys went opposite directions at the last moment, when lances had to strike or lift.

Ryssand tried a sweep of the lance to catch him: Cefwyn flung himself past its reach. Ryssand spun his horse about, its iron-shod feet about to overrun him; but Cefwyn had fought the Chomaggari, with their breed of infighting, infantry half-carried into battle by their cavalry, in among the stones and brush of the southern hills. Ryssand kept turning his horse, his shieldman trying for position, but Cefwyn laid hold of the tail of Ryssand’s surcoat and held on, pulling Ryssand sideways, down on his back and under his own horse’s hooves as the horse backed from its rider’s shifting weight.

The horse dealt the telling blow. The second came on the sword’s edge, and Ryssand’s head parted his body.

With an anguished shout Ryssand’s shieldman forced his way past his lord’s horse and rode down at him, and in a moment stretched long and clear as if by magic, Cefwyn turned on his heel and kicked the butt of the fallen lance into the horse’s path.

The horse went down, the rider spilled, and lay unmoving when the horse gathered itself dazedly to its feet.

Cefwyn caught a ragged breath then, and lurched half-about toward Idrys, who engaged his predecessor on foot in a noisy bout of swordsmanship, Idrys the younger man and the quicker, but Gwywyn a master years had proved.

Gwywyn knew, now, however, that he was alone, and he began to retreat, perhaps fearing some ignoble blow from the side.

He erred. He died, in the next instant, and Idrys shook the blood from his sword.

Cefwyn proffered him the reins of Ryssand’s destrier. “Catch me the guard’s horse. I’m too weary to chase him.”

“Majesty,” Idrys said, between breaths. It was rare to see sweat on master crow, but it was abundant. Idrys looked as if he had run miles, and perhaps he had, but he took the offered reins, and mounted stiffly on Ryssand’s bow-nosed horse.

And now four Dragon Guard and two Lanfarnesse rangers came sliding down from the height of the rocks.

“Damn you!” Cefwyn said to the Lord Commander.

“They were engaged,” Idrys said smoothly, from horseback. “I hurried to my appointment, my lord king. I think more may arrive shortly.—By your leave.”

He rode out. In a moment he had caught the guard’s horse, and led it back.

“My lord king,” Idrys said calmly, handing him down the reins, and by now, indeed, several more rangers stood on the height, and the fighting uphill had come almost to a standstill, a last few of the enemy seeking safety in flight, which Idrys indicated with a flourish of his hand. “Lord Maudyn seems to hold the hill; we have these rocks and several score men of my choosing from place to place along the ridge. I think between us the enemy has met his match.”

CHAPTER 8

The battering of the doors gave way to a crash of wood, a clump and a clatter on the stairs, and a worried shout.

“M’lord!” Uwen called, and came running up the steps, shield scraping on the stones, his face white and sweating: it was a far run in armor, but up he came, with Tristen’s guard and Crissand’s thumping behind him, onto the upper floor of the fortress.

“It’s gone,” Tristen said, meeting him in that unfamiliar hallway, and such was the relief he felt in saying it that the sky outside the windows seemed lightened. Crissand was beside him. There, too, was a glad reunion, Crissand with his father’s guard and their captain.

“The lightnin’ cracked an’ the sky was blowin’ somethin’ fierce,” Uwen said, out of breath. “But then we said that you was in there an’ b’ gods them gates was comin’ down.”

Just so he could imagine Uwen saying it: those great, well-set gates.

“With a ram,” Crissand’s captain said, “since there was this great old tree gone down in the wood’s edge. The lads spied it and we had the limbs off it and up and took it against the gate.”

“But the guards at the gate was confused in the banners,” Uwen said, “Tasmôrden claimin’ the same device. They fell to arguin’ amongst themselves whether it was Tasmôrden back again rammin’ ‘is own gates, or what it all meant… which he’s outside the walls, m’lord, somewhere! But Aeself’s goin’ through the town, street to street, now, tellin’ all the folk that it’s yourself, m’lord, that it’s Amefel come across the river, and they should hunt out the blackguards that’s left.”

There was a sudden tumult of arms within the halls, somewhere close.

“Our own,” Uwen said pridefully. “Them bandits o’ Tasmôrden’s is goin’’t’ ground an’ hopin’ for dark. They’re outnumbered by far.”

The gray space was open again. It was as if with the passing of the Shadow within the fortress that the sky and the land had lightened and spread wide, and Tristen could both hear and see again within the gray space. And the lords of the south he perceived. And the skirmish in the hall he perceived, and the living folk in the town, with Aeself among them. Cefwyn’s forces he perceived.

But Tasmôrden he could not find.

“Cefwyn’s east and south of us,” he said. “We have to tell him we’re here.” He led the way down the stairs, down to the lower hall of a fortress he had never entered by its proper doors. Its walls were stone unplastered in its upper courses, and its floor pavings smoothed more by age than art.

And the wooden doors stood ajar, the bright wounds of the wood and a bar standing askew attesting how force and a stone bench had gained entry for his men.

He set a hand on Uwen’s shoulder, grateful beyond measure, and they went outside, where Lord Cevulirn stood on the steps with Umanon of Imor Lenúalim, directing riders who occupied the walled courtyard.

“The lost are found,” Cevulirn said, seeing them, and Tristen came and embraced the man, embraced stiff and proper Lord Umanon as well, and then had the dizzy notion that hereafter he truly did not know why he lived, or what he should do, or where he belonged. It was as if all that directed him had left, and when he stood back from Umanon he looked outward across the open courtyard, to the open doors, and the walls of houses of a town he had never seen.

He was still lost. Owl had flown up when he came out the doors, and settled now on an absently offered wrist as he gazed over all this motion and tumult of men who took his commands and sought his advice.

But Cevulirn and Umanon knew the governance of a people far better than he knew; Uwen knew the ordering of soldiers in far more detail than he. Crissand knew the needs of the countryfolk far better than he. He looked out across the square and saw Sovrag of Olmern with his men, and Lord Pelumer with him, saw all this array of martial power set now amid a town that had been in the grip of a bandit lord, and saw what appeared to be the common people venturing to the gate, to look inside and wonder what had come on them now.

He knew where he did not belong.

—Emuin? Master Emuin? he asked, anxious for the old man, for Paisi and Ninévrisë and Lusin and all he had left behind; and an answer came to him, at least that master Emuin’s charts were in an irresolvable muddle and that baskets and pots and powders were strewn everywhere.

But Emuin was alive, and so was Paisi, and so was Ninévrisë, and they could be here, if they chose. He invited them, if they chose… Eeave Lusin in charge, he said, and showed Emuin the way.

“Where’s Dys?” he asked, for he longed to find that other heart he could not touch at a distance: he relied on Uwen, and on Crissand, and sure enough, now his guard had found him, Gweyl and the rest, and would not be shaken lightly from his tracks. “Cefwyn’s out there.”

“Ye ought to send a messenger, m’lord,” Uwen said. “Ye ought to sit here safe and send one of these lads.”

“But I won’t,” Tristen said, with the least rise of mirth. “You know that I won’t.”

“As I ain’t the captain of Amefel any longer,” Uwen said, “I can shake free an’ ride with ye; an’ as your guards has to go, though probably ye can call the lightnin’ down on any leavin’s of Tasmor-den’s lot… still we’ll go, m’lord.”

Idrys’ men had gone out, probing toward Ilefínian, and came back again to say there was a strange assortment of banners before riders on the road: the black banner of the High Kings that Tasmor-den had claimed, in company with the Tower and Checker of the Regent and the Eagle of Amefel, with two and three others less clear to the observers.

“Tristen,” was Idrys’ pronouncement, where they had established not a camp, but a staying place on the hilltop, under the open sky, a place for dressing wounds and collecting the army in order. “Did I not say this egg would hatch?” Idrys asked. And Cefwyn finding no word: “What shall we do, my lord king?”

What indeed should they do? Cefwyn asked himself somberly. Go to war with Tristen? Call a battered Guelen army to take the field against the friend of his heart, who had claimed that banner?

“Bring Danvy up,” Cefwyn said, looking out and down the hill.

Close after the battle, two of Anwyll’s men had found Anwyll climbing uphill with Kanwy in hand and a handful of the company behind him, but Kanwy had a wound and was due a rest: it was his light horse that would serve now, for a short ride and a meeting.

“What shall we do?” Idrys repeated his question, hammering it home.

“Do? I think I shall meet my friend and hope for my lady’s safety at his hands.”

“Hope?” Idrys echoed him. “Is hope what we have, now? Nothing of faith? The hatchling’s spread wings, my lord king, and it’s no damned pigeon we deal with.”

Cefwyn gave a wry and silent laugh. “A dragon. A dragon, master crow. But he is still my friend.”

Idrys said nothing for a moment, only gazed at him as if in reproach. Then: “He was still your friend when he sent me to the Olmernmen. He was still your friend when he marched, and he leads those who are my lord king’s sworn men, but now, now there is a question.”

“What should I do?” Cefwyn repeated. “If you have any notion, crow, out with it.”

“Demand,” Idrys said. “Impose. Insist, my lord king. You owe the kingdom that.”

“The kingdom.” The ache had settled hard into his body. Even drawing a deep breath hurt, and he swept a glance about him, at those who had been faithful, whatever their reasons… some even for love of him. He looked at that, rather than the betrayals, but not wholly successfully. “He has the knack of gaining love. That’s to envy.”

“My lord king has those who love him.”

He glanced at Idrys, catching something perhaps by surprise. He did not know why, after all else, he was embarrassed to catch Idrys thus unaware. But he pretended to have looked elsewhere, for both their sakes, and folded his arms. “Horses.”

“My lord king,” Idrys said, and relayed the order to a page, who called a groom, who called his assistants, for where the king of Yles-uin went was no small number.

Riven trees marked the battle in the elements, a trail of splintered trunks and wrecked limbs, bright wood through the leafless forest; so Tristen saw as they rode. The limbs were bare as those in Mama’s depths, where the wood wound around the end of the ridge.

But there color bloomed, the bright red Marhanen banner, and the Tower and Checker of the lady Regent, and so they came within sight one of the other.

Tristen set Dys to a faster pace, and rode ahead of his banners and those who chased after him; so did the king of Ylesuin, and they met under the afternoon shadow of the ridge, slid down from their horses and embraced as friends too long parted.

“High King, is it?” Cefwyn asked, setting Tristen at arm’s length.

And it was a question Tristen had to answer, but not in few words.

Ninévrisë had come with Emuin: he knew that while he rode. It was brave of them, but arrive they had, by the old mews, and Tarien with them, for Ninévrisë would not leave Tarien or the baby behind in Henas’amef. There was one Aswydd who ruled there, and it was neither of them.

“Emuin’s come,” Tristen did say. “And Her Grace. Not by the road, by the old mews. And Crissand’s the aetheling, which I don’t want to be.”

“What do you wish?” Cefwyn asked him, and he knew the seriousness of that question, as he knew the significance of the banner he could not set aside.

“To ride with my friends and see the summer again,” he said, which was indeed the best thing in the world to him. In the gray space Emuin might say the banner had to fly, and Owl was surly and insistent, winging constantly toward Ynefel, but he was determined not to stay there, nor at Althalen, where the frail wooden tower still stood.

“Come to Ilefínian,” he asked Cefwyn. “Owl wants me to come with him, but I won’t, yet. There are things I don’t know yet. There are things I haven’t seen.” A crown and the duties of a king were not at all within his longing: rather escape from both was what he plotted, escape for him, and the freedom of the kingdoms and the kings and lords to live in peace. A king over all could be a king in name, but the rulers of the lands had to live there.

A bough had broken its buds, the least small hint of gold and green, recalling whole forests that sighed and moved with the breezes.

Spring and promises: everything was new and old at once. Tristen saw it with wonder and saw the pledge of the summer to come, green grass and gentle winds.

A child danced before them, as they rode back to Ilefínian. Cefwyn and Uwen neither one could see her, but Tristen and Crissand did.