Fortress of Owls

Chapter 1

Master Emuin had packed in a night, when His Majesty in Guelemara had decreed a new duke for Amefel. Baskets, barrels, and bundles had gone out of master Emuin’s tower room in the Guelesfort in the heart of Guelemara and into wagons that night of storm and departure, and after a slow transit between provinces, up they had come, a week and more later, into the appointed tower in the fortress of Henas’amef.

But when master Emuin’s new tower room had reached its apparent limits, as it had on the day following his arrival, why, baskets and bundles coming up for the week afterward had necessarily accumulated on the stairs and on the very small landing, hardly more than a step, that gave a servant, a petitioner, or the new duke of Amefel himself scant place to stand and knock for admittance.

“Master Emuin?”

“Leave it on the stairs! Gods bless, fool, there’s no more room!”

“Master Emuin, it’s Tristen, if you please.”

Footsteps crossed the floor. The door opened. The old man peered out, hair disarrayed and gusting past his face in a cold wind and a white daylight that said the shutters were open despite the snow sifting down outside.

“Master Emuin, you’ll freeze.” Tristen pushed through the door into the round tower room, where, indeed, shutters were wide to the winds and windows were blazing white with winter sky. Emuin was wrapped in a heavy traveling cloak, and so was Tristen, but for different reasons, Tristen was sure. Master Emuin had kept his room in the Guelesfort in similar state, but in the milder days of autumn, and, however new to his authority over the old man, Tristen was certainly not disposed to tolerate that state of affairs here.

Consequently, he began closing shutters.

To Emuin’s clear indignation: “And how am I to see, pray?”

“Candles. Lanterns. As other people do, sir! People account me the simpleton, and you the wizard and wise man, and you have the hall full of baskets and this tower so cold it gusts cold wind into the lower hall. Whence this notion not to have candles?”

There followed a small, uncomfortable pause in which Emuin looked elsewhere.

“It is that?” Tristen asked, surprised to have happened on the truth. Then he added that favorite, persistent question that always found so little patience among ordinary folk: “Why, sir?”

“Plague and bother of lighting fires! Leave my shutters alone! The place is dark as a cave.”

“If you’ll not have Tassand arrange this, then I shall, sir. I will, with or without your leave.” It was a great impertinence to defy the old man, but he had learned of Cefwyn how to argue, and argue he was prepared to do.

“The duke of Amefel will not carry baskets and build shelves! There are simply too many baskets to fit! They used to fit! I don’t know how it came to be so much. Leave one shutter, I say! How can a man see?”

“Then you’ll accept Tassand’s help.” He faced an obdurate, weary old man, one who had not planned to reestablish his workshop twice, a man at his wits’ end after a hard journey… an old man who still, a week after coming all this journey specifically to advise him in his new office, at least as Emuin had said to him, continually found reasons not to speak to him frankly on far more important matters than baggage obstructing the stairs. “And you shall have it, sir, his help or mine. You may choose which, but the lower hall is full of drafts, and the candles blow out when someone opens the east doors.”

A tremor of weariness had come into Emuin’s mouth, and more wrinkles than usual mapped the territory around his eyes. He trembled on the verge of yielding. Then: “No! No, you will not be arranging baskets or carrying them.”

“Then Tassand, sir. His Majesty set me in charge. I must have the baskets up the stairs and the shutters shut.”

A second surly glance.

“I’ll have them set in whatever order you wish,” Tristen said, “a fire laid, candles lit. Please have all the windows shut by this evening, sir, at least by the time the sun goes down.”

“Beeswax. None of your tallow candles, young lord, nothing stinking of slaughter. I will have beeswax.”

Then there was more in it than candles, as there was more in Emuin’s insistence on open windows than a desire for daylight by day and a view of the stars at night. Master Emuin was not a man who chose luxury or spent money profligately, beeswax being the luxury, above tallow. But he was a wizard, and the question of beeswax or tallow passed not without note and not without significance in Tristen’s thoughts.

“Beeswax,” Tristen said, “you shall have, sir.” He was pressed for time in this small foray up the stairs, and let the precise reason of the candles escape comment, but he marked it for inquiry at some quieter moment. “You’ll have Tassand’s earnest attention to whatever things you need, clothing for attendance in hall… and all set in order in a proper clothespress.” He saw that the one that did exist was crammed so full of bottles and papers the doors stood open.

“Nonsense.”

“Tassand need not retrieve your robes out of baskets.”

“I have no room, I say! Hang them on a peg. For a peg, I have room!”

“Join me at supper this evening, where it’s warm. Cook will have meat pies.”

“When I have found my charts, young lord! If I have found my charts, which at the moment seems unlikely!”

Emuin shouted in frustration, and Tristen found his own amiability tested. “They might be in those baskets on the stairs, sir. Dogs might come at them. There was a dog about. I saw him below.” That this had been far out in the yard, from the window, he failed to say. Whatever moved master Emuin to accept help and hasten his baskets up the steps was a benefit.

“Perish the creature! Very well, very well, send Tassand! Gods bless!” Master Emuin cracked his shin against a bench in the dimmed light. “Leave me one window, if you please! I have old eyes. Gods, what a contentious lad you’ve become!”

“For your health’s sake, sir, and the servants’, and the downstairs candles, and to have your advice for a long time to come, without your taking ill up here, yes, I have become extremely contentious.” Tristen relented, leaving one leeward shutter ajar on stiff metal hinges so that the room was not altogether in twilight. He had had a fire laid in the hearth and wood provided in advance of his teacher’s arrival, and it had burned far too fast, thanks to the gusts, he was sure.

The tower room had a fireplace which shared a duct with the guardroom below and the hall below that, three flues and one common stonework that led to the wayward and now wintry winds above the fortress roof. It was thanks to the warm stonework, with other rooms’ smoke passing through, that there was any comfort at all in the room. “You need more firewood. Have you asked?”

“No, no. And I don’t need a fire. The damned wind kicks up a gale in here when the flue’s open. Damn.” Master Emuin had found a pot of powders spilled in the bottom of a basket, and was not in a good humor. “Damn, damn.”

It seemed time for even the lord of Amefel to make a quiet retreat, out the door and down past the numerous baskets of herbs and birds’ nests and down again the rambling East Stairs, with its little nooks and shelves and half levels, themselves piled high with stray baskets. His guard, four men, his constant and trusted companions, had waited below, and followed him from there.

It had not been an entirely satisfactory meeting. He had come upstairs intending to set the fortress generally under master Emuin’s surveillance, had found himself distracted into argument about the shutters.

Distraction in master Emuin’s vicinity was not an uncommon occurrence. He would have liked to have asked master Emuin about the archives and the problems there. He would have liked to consult master Emuin about the vacant earldom of Bryn, but they had ended arguing about other things. He saw no likelihood that all the baskets and bundles were ever going to fit into the tower. Now he walked the hall uneasy in this requirement regarding the candles, which echoed off his own dislike of Emuin’s open and unwarded windows… and there was another piece of unfinished business he had not yet had a chance to discuss with Emuin: the wizard-work that had left the fortress more open than some to wizardous attack.

He most of all wished that master Emuin would leave his charts in whatever disorder they fell, look at events around him, and provide a steady and sober counsel to him in his new rule over the province of Amefel.

Yes, Emuin had advised him in some limited particulars, but there remained the flood of mundane matters which he had not yet been able to persuade the old man to hear, such as the pile of petitions regarding land settlements, and several very much greater ones, involving the king and the situation in Elwynor.

But no, Emuin would not be at peace to hear anything so important until his workshop was in order, which it was not, and showed no prospect of being. Tristen began asking himself where he could find storage outside the tower, which master Emuin thus far refused to consider; he had come upstairs to gain advice about the affairs of the fortress, and instead found himself wondering where he could set a clothes-press.

Now he found himself wondering why he had ever thought he could spare an afternoon to leave the fortress and ride outside the walls.

But Earl Crissand had pleaded with him and cajoled him to take some relief from the demands on his attention. He had a need and a duty, Crissand said, to see the people and be seen by them, a duty he could not accomplish inside the fortress. The ducal seat at Henas’amef had become remote and estranged from the commons even under its recent duke and duchess, and the last authority, Lord Parsynan, had brought the land nothing but grief and bloodshed. It was time the people saw hope for better days.

So here they were, he and his guard all cloaked and gloved and equipped for winter riding—an unexpectedly appropriate weight of clothing for venturing the tower room—bound for the west doors and the stable-court. The escape seemed both more attractive and less responsible since the conversation above; and he only hoped to reach the stables.

All through the lower hall the household staff with mops and buckets fought back the thin gloss of mud soldiers and workmen brought from the snowy yard. And around the central doors, that mud mixed with the shavings and dust of workmen repairing the damages of their new lord’s accession. It was a second source of draft in the fortress, where wind leaked through the nailed patches, and it was a hazard to his escape, a source of overseers with questions.

He foresaw it: now a well-dressed master craftsmen intersected his path and showed him a paper, the requests of craftsmen for an order of oak planks.

Consult Tassand, was his answer to no few. He was sure his chief of household knew no more about oak planks than he did about wizardry and herb lore—less, in fact—but Tassand at least knew how to send petitioners to appropriate places. From being merely a body servant, Tassand had become a duke’s master of household, did the office of chamberlain and half the office of seneschal.

Tassand seemed to know, moreover, when an order was excessive or excessively expensive, which his lord did not. He did know that money represented hours and quality of a man’s work, and that dukes did not have an endless supply of it.

But today, faced with an order for wood which seemed reasonable for carpenters, and anxious to reach the doors: “Yes,” he said, and moved on. “Yes,” he said, to a further request, and he had no more than sent that man off, than a third man in court clothes appeared in his path, unrolling drawings of the carvings of the new main doors, and asking whether the design pleased him.

“The Eagle of Amefel in the center panel, do you see, Your Grace, and the border of oak leaves, for endurance…”

He had no idea why he should be asked about the carving for the main doors, which he had simply ordered repaired to stop the draft. The only usefulness of the carving might be a kind of magical seal, and everyone from earls to servants to his close friends had assumed that common doors would not do… nothing common ever suited. Endurance seemed a reasonable, a happy wish, to which he certainly consented, and with a wish of his own he reinforced it… he helped the craftsmen as he could, not knowing what he was supposed to do.

But by now he was sure he was overdue in the stable-court, and he was more and more sure Crissand was right in urging him to ride out for a day: he grew weary and short of patience. His court did everything in a great deal of fuss and uncertainty, and questions seemed to come to him faster than he could learn. Wishes for solutions aside, he had not enough officers, not enough servants, no clear lines of appeal—and, as Tassand had informed him, unhappily there was no other person established as the authority. What had existed, Parsynan and Edwyll between them had destroyed; and now both were gone, and he was there.

Consequently everyone wanted his attention, everyone wished to establish their connections and their favor with the new duke, and in the process their demands pressed on him until his head fairly swam with questions. He did not know who should do these things. He had no idea. And under the incessant demands for his attention, he could not find answers.

Indeed he was so overwhelmed he feared even Crissand had motives in stealing him away for several hours in private… points to press, favors to gain at the worst; and in agreeing to go, he knew it would wound him to the heart if that was all Crissand’s reason in seeking his company. He hoped for less selfish notions in this young man who seemed so inclined toward him. He hoped for some beacon in this sea of demands, but he had been disappointed before, discovering even master Emuin set his own will ahead of friendship and promises, and that Cefwyn, whom he loved, had as many demands on his time as he had.

He understood Cefwyn’s situation, now, in a way he never could have before.

But knowing that turned him desperately to seek warmth and company where it seemed to offer. And, oh, that might be foolish of him, and expose him to hazards such as he had seen in Cefwyn’s court.

But he went. He trusted. He stormed through the last stretch of hallway toward the stable-court before more questioners could close about him—for he had been indoors for an entire fortnight now, imprisoned in his duty, in men’s squabbles and difficulties, while all the wonder of snow spread across the land outside his misted, frosty windows.

And now the chance was on him. He rushed toward freedom in simple, undilute curiosity, eager to meet the sights that had tantalized him and eager to have a horse under him for a few hours… eager most of all to have Crissand beside him and the sound of a friendly voice without a single demand for favor or approval of some document.

Cefwyn had made him duke of Amefel… and of all pleasures the high office might have afforded (the prior lord, Heryn, had ordered gold dinnerplates, and the viceroy, Lord Parsynan, had coveted a lady’s jewels), he discovered that the greatest and least attainable of all his treasures was time, time to ride out in the sparkling white and time to be with friends.

And when he and his accustomed bodyguards, Lusin and the rest, escaped out the west doors into the snowy damp air and thumped down the steepest steps in the fortress—he found himself both free and faced with a yard he had forgotten would be teeming with soldiery and oxen and carts.

“The lord’s come down!” A trio of stablehands scampered at the sight of them, dodging through the confusion of ox teams and heaps of equipment bound for the bottom of the hill, all shouting for the duke’s horses as they went. Tristen regarded the commotion with some dismay: nothing he did these days was circumspect or secret, and no one went sluggishly to accommodate him; the carts were going to the border, the army was going, this was the day he had appointed, and such had been his haste this morning he had not even realized his ride and the carts’ being loaded overlapped each other.

Almost as they cleared the bottom step, one of the stablemaster’s lads came laboring through the press with the tall ducal standards bundled together, brought from their storage near the armory, a heavy burden for a slight lad. It was a heavy burden, too, for the grown men appointed to carry them when they were unfurled. They were inevitably cumbersome, and in the wish of his heart, Tristen would have bidden the boy put the banners back in their safekeeping so he and Crissand could simply ride free and enjoy the day in anonymity… but those banners were part and parcel of their honest excuse for riding forth today. They would show them abroad, ride through the town of Henas’amef in brave display, and visit the nearest villages, likewise: and all that was to confirm that, indeed and at last, Amefel had a lord watching over them and doing the sort of things a lord did. In a winter ominous with war and its preparations, Crissand had reasoned with him, the people needed to see him. Banners were for courage, and they had to see them fly.

War… he did understand. Doors and orders for oak were another question altogether.

Perhaps Crissand might show him that, too.

Carts maneuvered with ponderous difficulty, one loading, one waiting. Uwen Lewen’s-son arrived through the gap between with bay Gia at lead—Uwen bundled up in a heavy cloak and with a coif pulled up over his silver-streaked hair. Tristen recognized the horse but not immediately his own right-hand man.

Uwen was more sensible than he was, Tristen thought, feeling the nip of the wind, in which his hair blew free. It was not a dank cold, but a crisp, invigorating one, with the sky trying its best to be blue. It was better weather than they had enjoyed for a week; but it might turn, and while he came from his hasty passage through the lower hall all overheated, he had his coif and cowl, his heavy gloves and lined boots, foreseeing wind among the hills.

“A fine day,” Uwen said. “Weather-luck is with us.”

“A bright day,” he said, his heart all but soaring. He had dreaded winter as a time of death, then seen it advance during their passage from Guelessar in an unexpected glory of frost… from his high windows he daily saw snow lying white and pure across the land and had wondered would it look as white close at hand.

And was snow like water, into which it turned, and did it change colors according to the sky like a pond? He saw it take on the glories of sunrise and sunset, such as there were under a leaden sky. He waited to see what the sun would bring.

And with the arrival of the sun for the first time in days he saw the promise of wonders. Even in the brawling confusion of the carts and the limited vantage of the stable yard, he saw Icicles, which he had only just learned as a Word, and never seen so glorious as just now, on this morning of sun breaking through the clouds. They decorated every ledge and eave, and sparkled. The most casual glance around at the yard showed how a frosting of snow glossed all the common things of the stable into importance. He had never noticed the curious carving about the stable door, for instance, an unexpectedly fine decoration for a humble building: the lintel was beautiful edged in the sifting of snow, a carving of flowers and grain, appropriate enough for horses.

All around him such details leapt up, from the pure snow lying on the stonework edges, white instead of mortar, to the way it made a thick blanket on the stable roof.

With Uwen accounted for and his guard waiting for their horses, he stared about him in a moment of delighted curiosity, seeking other wonders, finding beauty even in the lion-faced drain spouts above them, that he had never seen.

He wished, of course, not to be seen gawping about, as Uwen called it: the duke of Amefel had to rule with dignity and become like other lords, immune to wonder, attentive to serious matters, never easily distracted from the solemn business of his rank.

Oh, but so many things were new in this, his first winter in the world. The eaves of the gatehouse and its roof slates shone so bright in a moment of clear sunlight that they hurt the eyes. Never in the world was light so powerful, and yet the air itself was cold.

Meanwhile the lad with the standards had delivered them to Sergeant Gedd, foremost of the standard-bearers riding with him today, and was about to pursue his own business. But Tristen, seeing those two young, strong legs, pounced on the messenger he needed and nipped the lad’s sleeve before he could quite escape.

“My lord!” Eyes were round and cheeks were cold-stung to a wondrously fiery blush. “May I serve m’lord?”

“Go inside, go upstairs to my apartments, and tell whoever comes to the door that I’ve spoken to master Emuin, do you have that? Say that Tassand is to go up to the tower as soon as possible and set it in order. Do you have all that?”

“Yes, m’lord! Tassand’s to go to the tower!” The lad was solemn now, and puffed up with importance, and, dismissed, bowed and raced up the outside steps in frantic haste, slipping on the ice there.

There went more mud into the halls, but certainly the boy was no worse than the soldiers. Advising Tassand might have waited until he returned from the ride: he had all but forgotten his agreement in the distraction of the hallway. But now Tassand would attend master Emuin before master Emuin could forget he had ever agreed, so they would not have that argument again. He might have the stairs clear and master Emuin’s noxious pots and powders out of the stairwell before evening, which might let Cook’s servants reach the old man with food without breaking their necks.

On such chance encounters and with such chance-met messengers he did business, and that, he was sure, was part of the trouble. When they had set out from the capital he had felt overwhelmed with the size of the staff he had brought along, and now he found it a very scant number to accomplish the running of a province. Cook, an Amefin woman, had found him several reliable new servants for the halls; Ness at the gate, who was Amefin, had found two more for the storerooms; and the clerk they had brought from Guelemara, a Guelenman who nevertheless looked to make a home here in Amefel, was looking for likely lads with suitable training.

The house staff he had inherited from Parsynan came from service in or to noble Amefin houses, each one of which had its ambitions and each one of which would hear reports from those they lent. Such servants as had served Lord Heryn and Orien had mostly fled across the river, some in fear of the king, some in fear of their neighbors and rivals… and those servants that did remain of the original staff had to be watched by the servants he trusted.

But still he gathered them—all the servants, all the folk who in some way had dealt with him in his first days. He counted them part of Amefel, and his, even searching after the lad who had first met him as a stranger in Amefel and guided his steps to the gate-guards. He sought them out, guided them into his safekeeping… and thus out of the hands of malign working from across the river, not enough of a staff yet, and those missing pieces were well scattered and hard to find again, which the more persuaded him it was necessary. He was here. He had a Place in the world. Certain things and persons had led him to that Place, and having done so, they were snared in magic: therefore, they had to be found.

Meanwhile, waiting for the lost to return and for the staff to reknit itself, they were short-handed.

“So master Emuin is havin’ Tassand’s help after all,” Uwen said, standing beside him at the bottommost step, looking over the yard from that slight advantage, taller than he by that means, when ordinarily that was not the case.

“If he admits he ever agreed,” Tristen said. “But I’ve learned. I press my advantage while I have it.”

“Gods know what’s in them baskets o’ his,” Uwen said. “I ain’t pokin’ into ’em, an’ I hope Tassand’s careful. Gods know what’ll crawl out.”

The boys were bringing the horses up by now, and the guardsmen that were serving as his escort arrived, already ahorse, passing in front of one of the wagons. Its ox team backed away from the crowding of half a dozen horses, not something an ox hitch or its wagon did well, and its left wheel aimed for a stack of barrels.

“Hold there!” Uwen shouted at the standing driver, seeing it in the same instant, and ran to slap the nearer ox on its rump and start it forward. The driver with his goad saw his dilemma and diverted his team on around the small circle of free space to face the gate, cart wheels not making the turn well, where Uwen again got to the fore, holding up both hands. “’At’s good. Now ye hold that cart right here, man, no matter who says otherwise, until His Grace is down the hill. Don’t ye be blockin’ the road.”

That effectively blocked all the other carts behind, who could not come through to load, but it saved them having that lumbering vehicle before them all the way down the hill… an incongruous precedence for a show of the ducal banners that would have been. The carts were gathering up the tents and heavy stores to take them down the hill, a slow process, that evidently had not started at dawn, when the ice was hard: they must have waited for the sun.

And that raised a question where Captain Anwyll was, who was supposed to be dealing with the drivers and the setting forth of the supplies to the river. Tristen observed Uwen’s crisp passing of instructions, faulted Anwyll for his absence from the scene, then realized that he himself as the lord of Amefel had been more properly looking out for such considerations as the order of precedence, rather than gazing at the icicles.

Mooncalf, His Majesty’s commander had been wont to call him.

“Where is Anwyll?” he asked Uwen.

“Dunno, m’lord. I’ll find out.”

The safety of others depended on him. He saw numerous failings in himself which he was resolved to mend, and knew that, no, it was not usually the grand things in which he failed: he had very reasonably, if high-handedly, contradicted the king’s orders, taken the wide risk with the weather in sending Cefwyn’s carts to the border with necessary supplies instead of back to Cefwyn, where they would wait idle all winter. The carters were irate: they had expected to be done and back on the road in the opposite direction, headed for Guelemara and their homes before the snows blocked the roads for good and all, and instead they were out on Amefin roads, which were little more than cattle-traces.

More, while the carts would not move in the deep winter, they were still Cefwyn’s, and the king needed those wagons in Guelemara for very much the same reason as he himself was fortifying the border in the south. He hoped that he was right in his estimations— that no sudden Elwynim incursion on Cefwyn’s west would make them necessary in the north, for he was not only keeping Cefwyn’s carts for one more duty, he had also appropriated to border defense the detachment of Dragon Guard that had escorted him to Amefel.

But he had had no choice. When Cefwyn had sent him to take command of the garrison of Guelen Guard, neither of them had foreseen the situation, that the Guelen Guard of the garrison would have so bloodily offended against the Amefin that the Amefin would no longer deal with them. The Guelens had to be set down, the Dragons sent to do their work.

Nor had he been able to ask Cefwyn what to do. Messages went slowly and unpredictably between Amefel and Guelessar, and with the weather, more so. He had not had a reply to his last message from the capital, it was six days to send and obtain an answer, at least, and meanwhile he could only solve the problems he had at hand: keep the disgraced Guelens under tight rein, in garrison at the capital, and send the reliable Dragons to hold the river to be sure the Elwynim did not keep their promise to the earls of Amefel and invade.

More, if the weather turned a little worse for a little longer, the river could freeze, and if it froze, there would be no division between Amefel and Elwynor. For that reason he wanted reliable men there to watch… especially over the main road at Anas Mallorn, north of Modeyneth, which was the only road that would carry a large force rapidly to the heart of Amefel.

And that meant the men he was sending to the river had to have supply enough to last the winter in case the weather turned worse.

So he had no choice but to borrow the king’s carts, weighing one disaster against another, and knowing Cefwyn was better served by a southern border in good order than by strict, uninformed obedience to his orders.

Such decisions, strategy, and maneuvering of armies, he could make with a clear head and strong confidence. He had done all that, and it weighed very little on his mind. It was the daily and moment-by-moment details of the operation that eluded him, and the details from which the sights and the sparkle of the sun claimed his attention. He knew the captains should have argued more strenuously about this day’s outing, about the carts, about the decisions he made, but no one had, and that was his abiding concern. They took his orders so well that no one told him his mistakes these days, and Uwen came back to him with no more than a shrug and a glance back at the drivers.

“Fools,” Uwen said, tugging his hand into a gauntlet.

Uwen should be here, administering the town. But Uwen would not let him ride out alone, and on the other hand, Amefel was too volatile a command, the feeling against Guelenfolk far too bitter to leave Captain Anwyll in charge of the capital. He left command to Lord Drumman, whom he trusted, an Amefin, and he hoped the Guelen Guard would create no new difficulty about it… not mentioning the other earls. He was only now learning which earl resented which other one in what particular respect.

But Drumman was generally liked. Therefore, he sent Anwyll to do the one thing a determined Guelenman might do with the goodwill of the earls: guard the river; Uwen he set in as much authority as Uwen was willing to take, but today Uwen went with him… his guard did, too, Guelen and conspicuously fair amid the generally darker Amefin.

“There’s Lord Meiden, m’lord,” Lusin said, and indeed, a little late himself, Earl Crissand had just ridden under the gate and past the rear of the inbound carts.

But not just the earl. The earl brought with him his own escort, the men of Meiden all cloaked and armed, and now completely obstructing the small courtyard around the oxcarts… indeed, Crissand’s guard turned out to exceed his own, a show of force from a decimated house… he did not fail to notice it himself, as all around him the men of his own, Guelen-born, escort stiffened their backs and stared with misgivings.

Crissand, too, seemed to realize he had made a misstep, and rode up much more meekly than he had ridden in. “My lord,” Crissand said, above the discontent lowing of oxen, and dismounted to pay his respects. “I had expected far more men. Forgive me. Shall I send back my guard?”

Did Crissand think so many guards prudent, and was Crissand right in estimating safety and risk out in his own rural land?

Crissand was young as he, at least in apparent years, and did many things to excess, but he had never seemed to be a fool regarding Amefel, and knew his land. They were Crissand’s villages they proposed to visit. Tristen’s eyes passed worriedly over the situation, as confusion reigned for a moment in the small yard and the Guelenmen of the Dragon Guard eyed the Amefin of Crissand’s household in suspicious assessment amid the oxcarts.

In the same moment a stableboy oblivious to all the rivalry of Guelen and Amefin escorts brought red Gery up, holding out the reins. Tristen found it easier to set his foot in the stirrup and be under way than to sort out the excess of guards and weapons and precedences and this lord’s sensibilities and that lord’s distrust. He was not unarmed, standing naked in his bath. He did not fear Crissand.

“Bring them,” he said to Crissand’s anxious looking up at him.

In truth he would be solely an Amefin lord, relying only on these men, once he dismissed his Guelen forces back to Guelessar, as he must when he had raised sufficient Amefin units. Was that why Crissand had brought so many—that Crissand had proposed to supply the escort for him?

How he would have a ducal regiment in any good order by spring without setting one earl against another was another question—which earldom would contribute men and how many? But it was not today’s question… for once he was up and had Gery’s lively force under him, the motion and the prospect of freedom chased all more complex thoughts from his head. He was in the right place; he had done the right things. He ached from too much sitting in chairs and far too many difficult and contentious decisions in recent days. He knew he had sat blind to the land he was supposed to be governing, and hearing his choices only from the lips of advisers. Now he had that saddle under him and Gery willing and eager to move, he was eager to go, and circled Gery about with an eye to the gate as Uwen and his guard mounted up. The two troops muddled ranks for a moment, then began to sort out in fair good spirits.

The Dragon Guard themselves had been glad to have an outing away from the barracks, and good humor prevailed, though Tristen suspected a sharp rivalry still manifested in the haste and smartness with which the banner of Amefel unfurled in Sergeant Gedd’s hands. The Eagle on its red field made a brave splash of color against the whites and browns and grays of the yard; and after it the two black banners of his other honors unrolled from their staffs, the Tower of the Lord Warden of Ynefel and the Tower and Star of the Lord Marshal of Althalen… both honors without inhabitants, but Amefin ones, so the Amefin made much of them. It was a brave show; and protocol held the banner of the Earl of Meiden to unfurl second: a blue banner with the Sun in gold, as brave and bright as Earl Crissand himself, dark as his fellow Amefin but with a glance like the summer sky. He might have been embarrassed for a moment in the relative size of their guards; but the day was so brisk and keen there was no resisting the natural joy in him. There was love in Crissand Adiran, of all the earls, a disposition to be near him, to seek his friendship—and how could he have thought ill of Crissand’s reasons?

There was love, a reliable and a real love grown in a handful of days, and Tristen did not know why it was: friendship had happened to both of them, on the sudden, completely aside from Tristen’s both endangering and saving Crissand’s life. It was no reason related to that, it was no reason that either of them quite knew. Crissand had simply risen on his horizon like the sun of his banner… and that was that. Prudence aside, putting by all worry for master Emuin and his advice, and for the workmen and for all the household, all in the friendship that had begun to exist, they were together, and there was a great deal right with the day simply in that.

With banners in the lead they rode out the iron-barred gates of the Zeide, gate-guards standing to sharp attention to salute them. The racket of their hooves echoed off the high frontages of the great houses around about as, wasting no time in the square, they began the downward course… numerous enough for an armed venture rather than a ride for pleasure, and they drew curious stares from those with business about the fortress gates, but as they entered the street the sun broke from a moment of cloud, shining all the way down the high street to midtown, lighting a blinding white blanket on gables of the high frontages, and that glorious sight gave no room for worry.

Traffic had worn off the snow in the streets to a little edge of soiled ice, and the brown cobbles ran with disappointingly ugly melt down that trace of sunlight, but above, about the eaves, all was glorious. The houses grown familiar to Tristen’s eye from the summer were all frosted with snow and hung with icicles, and the sunlight danced and shone on them as they rode, shutters dislodging small falls of snow and breakage of ice as they opened for townsmen to see. The cheer in the company spread to the onlookers, who waved happily at this first sight of their new lord outside the fortress walls, and in company with Amefin. Already they had encouraged high spirits.

And, oh, the icicles… small ones, large ones, and a prodigious great one at the gable of the baker’s shop, on a street as familiar to Tristen’s sight as his own hallway atop the hill… familiar, yet he had never noticed that gable, never noticed half the nooks and crannies and overhangs of the high buildings that carried such sun-touched jewelry today.

It seemed wondrous to him, even here in the close streets. He turned to look behind them, gazing past the ranks of ill-assorted guardsmen and cheering townsfolk as dogs yapped and gave chase. It gave him the unexpected view of the high walls and iron gates of the Zeide, all jeweled and shining as if enchantment had touched them.

Lord Sihhë! someone shouted out then, at which he glanced forward in dismay. Others called it out from the windows, Lord Sihhë and Meiden! in high good cheer. The sound racketed through the town, and people shouted it from the street.

Lord Sihhë indeed. That, he had not wished. The Holy Father in Guelessar would never approve that title the people gave him; and the local Quinalt patriarch, before whom he had to maintain a good appearance, was sure to get the rumor of what the people shouted. Feckless as he had been, he had learned the price words cost, and he wished he could hush those particular cries… but they did it of love, nothing ill meant, and it was all up and down the street. The old blood might be anathema to the Guelen Quinalt; but among Amefin folk, who were Bryaltines, it was honor they paid him. They shouted it in delight: Lord Sihhë and Meiden! as Crissand waved happily at the onlookers, the partnership of the oldest of Amefin houses with the banner of Althalen, as it had been a hundred years ago, when Meiden was the friend of the Sihhë… was it that they thought of?

Past the crossing at midtown, they gathered speed on the relatively clear cobbles and jogged briskly downhill past a last few side streets and the last few shops and trades, down to the rougher, more temporary buildings near the walls. The town’s lower gates stood open: they ordinarily did so by broad daylight; and consequently there was no delay at all to their riding out, no more concern for townsfolk and titles or the determined town dogs. The wide snowy expanse beyond the dark stone arch was freedom for a day.

He found himself lord of a changed land as he rode out… white, white, where the brown of autumn had been, and before that, the green and gold of enchanted summer… all gone, all buried and blanketed and tucked away for the winter.

All the knotty questions of armies and rivalries and titles and entitlements of lords fell away in broad, bright wonder, for if breath-blurred windows had shown him the surrounding fields and orchards as hazy white, the utter expanse of it had until now escaped him. There just was no cease of it. Boundaries that all summer and fall had said here is one field and here another, here a meadow, there a field… all were overlain until stone fences and sheep-hedges made no more than ridges.

But while those grand lines had blurred, he had never, at the distance of his windows, imagined the wealth of details written in the new snow, the record of farmers’ traffic that told where men and beasts had walked hours, even days ago. The landing of a bird left traces, like marks on parchment.

Shadows of birds, too, passed on the snow, prompting him to look up, and then to smile, for his birds flew above them, outward bound, his silly, beloved pigeons, faring out on their business, as by evening they would fly home to the towers and ledges of the fortress, looking for bread and their perches. They circled over once, and flew out ahead, seeming to have urgent business in mind… a barn, perhaps the spill of a granary door: the woods never suited them. The woods were Owl’s domain.

“Are they the ones from the tower?” Crissand asked, himself looking up.

“I think they are.”

“Do they follow you?” Crissand asked.

“They go where they like. I don’t govern them.”

Did his birds fly sometimes far afield, and did they sometimes meet the pigeons that nested at Ynefel?

He was not sure, indeed, that anything lived at Ynefel. He saw them sweep a turn toward the west, indeed, away, away toward the river… and equally toward the stony hills around ruined Althalen. Ruins suited them well: they liked ledges and stonework. Certainly birds that dared nest at Ynefel, if they were the same birds, would never fear Althalen.

“Nothing of omen,” Crissand wondered in some anxiousness.

“No,” he said as they rode, “only birds.”

A cloud came, passed. Many clouds came and went, and fields blazed white after shadow. Snow on bare gray apple branches made lacework of the eastern view. Moving shadows grayed the hills, and the sky was an amazing clear blue with fat wandering clouds, while the morning’s fall cast a winter glamour on common stones and roadside broom. The horses’ nostrils flared wide, their ears pricked forward in the bracing air. Their steps were willingly quick and light.

“Is it the South Road we use all the way?” he asked Crissand at a certain point. He had looked at maps; but the hills were a maze of small trails, some missing from the charts, he much suspected, and he was very willing to use a shortcut and go up into the wonderful hills if Crissand knew one.

“Yes, my lord, south an hour,” Crissand said, “to Padys Spring. There’s an old shrine, and the village track to Levey comes in there, only over the ridge. We’ll leave the main road there.”

Padys rang not at all off memory, neither the village of Levey, nor Padys Spring… though he was sure there should be water where Crissand described a spring being.

But, also, to his vague thought, the name of the place was not quite Padys.

“Bathurys,” he said suddenly, pleased to have caught it.

“M’lord?”

“Bathurys,” he said. It seemed increasingly sure to him that that was the proper name of the spring, as sometimes the very old names came to him. There was a shrine, Crissand had already said; but he was less sure of that fact.

But there at least should be a spring at a place called Bathurys, and when he set a right name to it, he far better recalled the lay of the land… thought of a village of gray stone, and flocks of sheep.

It was not so far a ride, then. He felt happy both in Gery’s free and cheerful movement and in the increasing good temper of the company around him. He even heard laughter among the soldiers behind, and beside him, Uwen, who habitually was shy of lords’ company, was not shy in Crissand’s presence, and bantered somewhat with Crissand’s captain, riding near them.

The two guard companies, the Dragons and the men of Meiden, had fought each other with bloody determination the night of his arrival; but the Dragons had also rescued Crissand and his men from execution, so with this particular Guelen regiment, the tally sheet of good and bad was mixed. Besides, the Dragons were a Guelen company the Amefin held in higher regard than they had ever held for the Guelen Guard, even before Parsynan’s rule here: the Dragons, better disciplined, had never been hard-handed with the townsfolk, never stolen, never done any of the things the Guelens had done, so he had it reported. So, warily, cautiously, goodwill grew, in the amity of the officers and the lords, so in the ranks.

And, truth, by the time they had passed the first rest and ridden over the icy bridge, Uwen and the captain of Meiden’s house guard were cheerfully comparing winters they had known, and arguing about the merits of sheep, while the men in the ranks had proceeded to local autumn, local ale, the taverns in Guelemara and those in Amefel, and the women they knew.

The men found their ways of talking. But Tristen labored in his converse with Crissand as if they were strangers, for all their prior dealings had been policy and statecraft. Now they talked idly, as common men did, about the autumn, the land, the flocks, and the apples. Uwen, who had been a farmer before he was a soldier, knew far more about any of these things, Tristen was sure, but Crissand knew everything there was to know about apples, their type, and their value. All Tristen found to do was ask question and question and question. Crissand did know his people’s trade, down to the tending of apple orchards and sheep, which he had done with his own hands, and had no hesitation in the answers. “The flocks are most of my people’s living,” Crissand said, “more so than the orchards in the last five years, since the blight. Lord Drumman’s district is all orchards of one kind and another. So is Azant’s. But we fared well enough in Meiden, since we have both sheep and apples: the barley never does well, to speak of: that comes from the east and from Imor and Llymaryn.”

And again, after a time, Crissand said, “Lewenbrook was hardest on Levey of all Meiden’s villages. Fourteen dead is a heavy toll for a village of two hundred, six more wounded, seven lost with my guard, a fortnight gone. That’s a quarter of all the village, and every man they had between sixteen and thirty.”

Tristen had not reckoned the dead in those terms, but it came clear to him, such a hardship.

“A great many widows for a small village,” Crissand said, “and them to do the spring plowing, except I gift younger sons from some of my other villages to go and plant for the widows when they’ve seen to their own fields.”

“We will not have Amefel for a battlefield again,” Tristen vowed, with all knowledge Cefwyn was going to war and that he must. He would not have the war cross the river. He was resolved on that.

“Gods grant,” Crissand said fervently.

Sun flashed about them when Crissand said it. It had been a moment of cloud, which passed… and indeed now there was certainly no tardiness in the heavens, though the wind was still. Spots of sunlight came and went with increasing rapidity across the land, glorious patches of light and gray shadow on the snow.

The talk was, albeit puzzling to him, also enlightening, even in this first part of their ride, of the things Crissand and the other lords had suffered, and what the villages needed. They had a certain shyness of each other at the first, and Crissand seemed to worry about offending him, telling the truth as Crissand would, but everything Crissand said, he heard. From orchards and sheep they talked on about this and that, gossiped about various of the lords, but none unkindly: Drumman’s ambition for a new breed of sheep, Azant’s daughter’s two marriages, her widowed at Lewenbrook, only seven days a bride—but not the only tragedy. Parsynan, so he had no difficulty understanding at all, had done nothing to mend the situation in the villages, nothing to recover Emwy from its destruction, nothing to help Edwyll’s heavy losses, only to collect taxes for the coronation levy and further punish the villages that had helped win the day.

“Then the king’s men came counting granaries and sheep again,” Crissand said, “and that was the thing that pushed my father toward rebellion, my lord. We’ve no villages starving yet, but by next year they’d be eating the seed corn, and that, that, my lord, there’s no recovering. So the Elwynim offer tempted my father, and the king’s men made him angry. That’s the truth of it. I don’t excuse our actions, but I report the reason of them.”

“I’ve yet to understand all Parsynan’s reasons,” Tristen said, “but at least by what I’ve seen, he built nothing. And I want the repairs made and no great amount spent, and no gold ornaments, and none of this. Yet they want to carve the doors, which is a great deal of expense, and more time, yet everyone, even the servants, say I should do it… while the villages want food. Is that good sense?”

“Our duke shouldn’t have plain doors,” Crissand said, “and if he understands the plight of the villages and sees to it they have grain, there’s no man will complain about the duke’s doors.”

“I need troops to the riverside more,” Tristen said in a low voice, still discontent with the delays for wood-carving, more and more convinced he should never have been persuaded to agree to it at all. “Any door would do to shut out the cold. I need canvas, I need bows, and I need horses and food.”

“To attack Elwynor, my lord?”

“To keep the war out of Amefel. And the armory. There’s another difficulty. Parsynan did nothing to maintain it; Lord Heryn kept it badly; Cefwyn set it to rights, and when the master armorer left to go with the king, Parsynan set no one in charge of it, and there’s no agreement between the tally and what’s there. I brought a good man back with me, Cossun, master Peygan’s assistant, and he can’t find records there or in the archive.”

“I fear there was theft,” Crissand said. “I even fear my men did some of it. But those weapons we have…” Crissand did not look at him when he added, “… even today. But Meiden wasn’t the only one to take weapons. The garrison made free of it, if my lord wants the truth. The Guelen Guard.”

“Yet where are the weapons?”

“Sold in the town, and pledged for drink, and such, in the taverns. The weapons are there, my lord, just not in the armory. Except if there was gold or silver, and that might have gone gods know where. To the purveyors of wine and ale and food, not to mention other things.”

It was a revelation. So were many things, in this fortnight of his rule here. Everywhere he looked there was another manifestation of Parsynan’s flagrant misrule, another particular in which a self-serving man had stripped the town and the garrison of whatever value might have served the people of Amefel. The Guelens, lax in discipline under Parsynan’s rule, had seemed to view the Amefin armory as a place from which to take what they would—and knowing what he knew, yes, he could believe no officer had prevented it.

“Did you hear that, Uwen?”

“Aye,” Uwen said, soberly. “An’ I ain’t surprised if those weapons is scattered through town, an’ I ain’t surprised if a lot of legs has helped ’em walk there, not just the Guelens. Metal’s metal, m’lord, an’ a good blade for a tanner or a wheelwright, that ain’t unlikely at all. Is it?” Uwen asked of the Meiden captain.

The man agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“And the archive?” Tristen asked Crissand.

“A man who wanted to remove a deed or change one,” Crissand said, “could do that, for gold. That was always true. Which is as good as stealing, but in one case it was done twice, once by Lord Cuthan, and then by a lord I’ll not willingly name, my lord, changing it back, so it never went to trial, because the archivist was taking money from both, and the last won. So I’d not believe any record that came to the assizes, my lord, because any could be forged. Some lands have two deeds, both sworn and sealed, and only the neighbors know the truth. So it comes to the court, and so my lord will decide on justice.”

He had not yet dealt with the question of contested lands, of which he knew there were several cases pending, and he found it even more daunting by what Crissand said.

And now he knew at least two things he was sure Crissand had drawn him out here to say, and none of it favoring the Guelen Guard or the viceroy’s rule here. The lord viceroy was gone; but the Guelen captain was not, and since the war needed the Guelen troops, their usefulness presented him a dilemma, two necessities, one for troops, the other simply not to have theft proceeding, especially of equipment.

The province had mustered for the war, he began to understand, and the weapons had just not gone back to the armory: the town was armed, and had been so, and yet the young men had no great skill in using the weapons. Hence so many of them had died at Lewenbrook. He did not like what he heard, not of the treatment of the contents of the armory, not of the forgery of records.

“They should not go on doing this,” Tristen said with firm intent. “They will not go on doing it.”

“Your Guelen clerk has taken no bribes,” Crissand said. “An honest man in office has thrown certain lords into an embarrassing position: the last man to change a document may not be the right man, as everyone knows him to be, and there’s a fear the whole thing will come out. Trust none of Cuthan’s documents, and be careful of Azant’s, on my honor… he’s a good man, my lord, but he’s done what he had to do, to counter Cuthan’s meddling. He regrets it, and now he’s afraid. If Your Grace asked all of them to return the deeds to what they were under Lord Heryn, it might be a fair solution. I say so, knowing I’ll lose and Azant will gain by that, but I think it’s fair, and it would make Azant very happy with Your Grace.”

He heard that. He heard a great many things of like import.

“This is all Levey’s care,” Crissand said finally, as they came over a hill. Gray haze of apple trees showed against the snow, acres of them. “These are their orchards. But the hills about here are sheep pasture… good pasture, in summer. A prosperous village, if it hadn’t lost so many men. The spring’s not far now, my lord.”

The snow had confounded all landmarks. He knew he had ridden past this place before, but it was all strange to his eye, and no villager had stirred, here… the snow ahead of them was pure, trackless, drifted up near the rough stone walls of the orchard.

“Do you hunt, my lord?” The wind picked up, and Crissand pulled up the hood of his cloak. “There’s fine hunting in the woods eastward, past the orchards. Hare and fox.”

“No,” Tristen said, flinching from the thought, the stain on the pure snow. “I prefer not.”

None of your tallow candles, master Emuin had said. Nothing reeking of blood and slaughter. Nothing ever, if he had his way. He had seen blood enough for a lifetime.

There was a small silence. Perhaps he had given too abrupt a refusal. Perhaps he had made Crissand ill at ease, wondering how his lord had taken offense.

“Yet Cook must have something for the kitchens, mustn’t she?” Tristen said, attempting to mend it. “So some will hunt. I don’t prefer it for myself.”

“What do you favor for sport, my lord?”

He blinked at the shifting land above Gery’s ears and tried to imagine all the fair things that filled his idle hours, a question he had asked himself when he saw laughing young men throwing dice or otherwise amusing themselves, cherishing their hounds or hawks.

Or courting young women. He was isolate and unused to fellowship. Haplessly, foolishly, he thought of his pigeons, and the fish sleeping in the pond in the garden, and of his horses, which he valued.

Riding was something another young man might understand, of things that pleased him.

“His Grace is apt to thinking,” Uwen said in his long silence. Uwen was wont to cover his lapses, especially when his lord had been foolish, or frightened people.

“Forgive me,” Tristen said on his own behalf. “I was wondering what I do favor. Riding, I think.” That was closest. So was reading, but it was rarely for pleasure, more often a quest after some troubling concept. “So long as the snow is no thicker than this, we might ride all about the hills and visit all the villages, might we not?”

“Snow never comes deep before Wintertide, not in all my memory.”

“And I had far rather wade through this than answer questions about the doors.”

“As you are lord of Amefel you may have carved what you like, and do what you like. The people do love you. So do we all, my lord, all your loyal men.”

That rang strangely, ominously out of the air, and lightly as he knew it was meant, he felt dread grow out of it, dread of encounters, dread learned where strangers feared other strangers, and encounters were mostly unpleasant. He felt shy, and afraid of a sudden, afraid of his own power over men’s lives. He felt afraid because Crissand felt afraid of him, and it should not be so. The other lords feared him. So did the common folk. He recalled the breaking forth of Sihhë stars on doorways, the cheers in the streets. “Love?” He thought on that a moment.

There was a small silence this time on Crissand’s side. “That you are Sihhë is no fault in their eyes.”

“I am a Summoning and a Shaping,” he said with more directness of his heart than he had ever used on that matter, even with Uwen, who rode close on his other side, Crissand’s captain somewhat back in the column for a word with another man. “That I may be Sihhë seems mere afterthought to being a dead Sihhë.”

“M’lord,” Uwen protested, and Crissand:

“You are our fair lord. None better. None better!”

“A Shaping, and a fool. Uwen knows. Cefwyn’s captain tells me so.”

“Spite.”

“No, I value that in him. And Uwen bears very patiently with my mistakes, knowing all my flaws, and keeps me from the greatest disasters…”

“M’lord!” Even Uwen was scandalized and did not return his fond smile.

“But you do so, and it is true, Uwen. I value your counsel as I value the Lord Commander’s, and your protection above his.”

“M’lord,” Uwen muttered, embarrassed. But it was still true. What Uwen gave him was beyond price or valuation; and he wished ever so much that he might have that kind of honesty from Crissand. He thought he had had it for a moment, and then it had turned to the flattering and the worship Crissand gave him, and he felt that change like a wound.

“Uwen is my friend,” Tristen said to Crissand, riding knee to knee with him, “and Lusin and my guards are my friends, and Tassand and my servants are my friends. And so is king Cefwyn and master Emuin and Her Grace of Elwynor; they know I’m a fool. His Highness Prince Efanor was kind to me, too, and gave me a book of devotions he greatly values. He thinks I’m a heretic. Commander Idrys of the Dragons, too; he calls me a fool and a danger, and I regard his advice. Annas, and Cook, here in Amefel, master Haman, all were kind to me, and I think they regard me as somewhat simple. But Guelessar was a lonely place. Lords, ladies, the servants in the halls and the cook and his men and all, all used to gods-bless themselves and didn’t deal with me.”

“They’re Quinalt,” Crissand said, as if that explained all the world.

“So is Uwen.”

“Not that good a Quinaltine,” Uwen said under his breath.

“And Cefwyn is my friend,” Tristen continued doggedly to his point. “If you wish to be my friend, Crissand Adiran, if you become my friend, you should know that I hold Cefwyn in friendship.”

“For your sake I give up all complaint against him.”

“And will bear him goodwill?”

He had the gift, Emuin had advised him, of both asking and telling too much truth, challenging the polite lies that kept men from inconveniencing each other and the great lies that kept men from each other’s throats. He had learned to moderate that, and wield silence somewhat more often.

But with this young earl who had first met him at sword’s edge and then sworn to him more extravagantly than all the other earls, with this young man who had brought him here to pour half-truths into his ear, he cast down the question like a gage, to see whether Crissand would pick it up or find a polite and empty phrase to avoid allegiance to the Marhanen… and truth to him. Either way, he would thus declare the measure of their friendship.

“What will you, my lord?” Again Crissand attempted to dance sideways, disappointingly so. “I bear all goodwill to the king.”

Uwen cleared his throat and said in a diffident tone, and without looking quite at Crissand: “His Grace is inclined to want the plain truth from a man on any number of points, your lordship, more ’n some is used to, but he ain’t ever apt to hold the truth again’ a man. Bein’ as he’s no older ’n last spring, when he come into this world, he’ll ask ye things ye might wonder at, meanin’ no disrespect by it. But ye’ll have the truth from ’im, if ye will to have it.”

It took courage for Uwen to speak up as he had, a common man, to what Uwen called his betters. But Uwen had shepherded him through courts and village streets and knew him as no other man did, and sometimes spoke for him when the going had gotten too tangled. Not even Cefwyn, nor even Emuin, knew him as Uwen did.

“Then I must tell the truth,” Crissand said in that silence that followed, “and this is the foremost truth: His Majesty’s law may call my father a traitor, and it’s true, traitor to the Marhanen; and so am I. Nor do I repent anything I did. You would have saved my father, I well know. I would that my father had lived and that the lord viceroy had died. From the time I was accountable of anything, my father told me no good could come to Amefel while a Marhanen sat the throne in Guelessar and Heryn Aswydd in Henas’amef. And, yes, Heryn was kin of ours. But no one of my house mourned him—nor were we surprised when the king in Guelemara sent Heryn’s sisters to a nunnery and set the viceroy over us. Nor were we at all surprised when the viceroy was a thief. Need he be better than Heryn Aswydd?”

All of that Tristen well understood. But the conclusion of it he did not. “Did you hope for better from Tasmôrden?”

“No. We hoped Tasmôrden would set my father in power. And after that, my father would see to Amefel. None other would. I’m not surprised to know there were no troops, nor would there be, coming to our relief. And when Cuthan betrayed us and you came and when the Guelen viceroy ordered us killed, I had no more hope. But I was not surprised.” A small silence followed. It was no good memory, and Crissand gathered a deep breath and a brisker voice. “But when you came into that courtyard and rescued us, and you did justice, my lord, for the first time in a hundred years, someone did justice for men of Amefel, I knew my father didn’t die in vain, that after all we have a lord I will follow. And if you bid me be loyal to the king, for your sake, my lord, then gods save the king in Guelemara, I say it with all my heart.”

That was a very great thing for an Amefin to say.

And when Crissand said gods save the king, Tristen unthinkingly resorted to the gray space in simple startlement, a recourse for a wizard’s Shaping as easy as a next breath or a wondering beyond the words and into the real motion of a man’s heart. He sped into that space with an awareness of the men closest on either hand, a feather-touch of awareness, of the familiar.

Uwen, for instance: Uwen was rather like a rock, steady, ordinary, incontrovertible, neither there nor quite aware of the things in that space, but coming quite close to reaching it, at times, through familiarity with him. The Meiden captain was dimmer in his awareness. So with the rest of the guards.

But Crissand glowed, faintly but incontrovertibly there. Crissand Earl Meiden himself was distant cousin to the aethelings of Henas’amef, and, with the aetheling blood came wizard-gift. Crissand to all seeming had not a glimmering awareness of the gift that was in him… a gift perhaps enough to bend luck in Crissand’s favor. Luck had failed Crissand’s father, whose heredity was at least half the same; yet Crissand said it: the cause had prospered. Luck had allowed Crissand’s men to save him from the viceroy’s order, so that Crissand and his mother both had lived.

And on that thought Tristen took a small pause, a cold small thought, that Crissand’s slight gift, his luck, was a pivot on which greater things turned, and when things were free to move, then wizardry had its best chance. On a small pin, a great gate swung.

Whose wizardry had it been? Or might it be magic at work, that sense that, somewhere, long ago, he had known Crissand Adiran, or someone very like him?

But Crissand in the gray space now had not a glimmer of ill will. Rather Crissand shone with a pure, plain, and dangerous folly of adoration, a heady wine for anyone who drank.

Like Emuin’s insistence on beeswax, it came with wizard-force, and sober as he had grown this autumn, such blithe excess of adoration frightened him. But in the reckless outpouring of Crissand’s heart, he found Crissand’s happiness and hope spread about him. Even the house guard and the Dragons had made a sort of conversational peace, and the world was incredibly fair and bright despite the grim talk of recent moments. Sunlight through the scudding, gray-bottomed clouds cast sparkling detail where it touched, random grains of snow shining like dust of pale jewels to left and to right of an untrodden road, and every hill and every copse of trees offered new beauty. Creature of a single year, he had imagined winter when it came would be deathly still, and instead he discovered it full of sparkle and motion and wonder around him, and he was warmed by unquestioning love.

Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much faith?

Could ever there be too much love?

And could love require lies?

He asked himself that. He had drawn Crissand once into the gray space himself, though he doubted Crissand had since ventured it on his own. He doubted, too, that Crissand had any least notion what had happened to him in that moment, or how he had found himself confronted while absent and, coatless and desperate, sent out into the snow.

He could teach Crissand, he thought, how to reach that place where concealment was very difficult. He was sure Crissand’s gift was strong enough. But to set Crissand at liberty in that place… there were dangers in it, dangers in the gift, dangers in the wandering. Dared he believe Crissand would never venture it on his own?

But Crissand’s attention was suddenly for a snowy ridge. He pointed to it and said, with a whitened barleyfield on the one hand and a bare-limbed apple orchard on the other, that they were coming to the crossroads.

“There is Padys Ridge, and the shrine and the spring just below it.”

A very old oak, winter-bare, fronted that ancient outcrop, sole wild representative of his kind in an otherwise tame land of orchards and small, pruned trees. Just beyond it, still within the reach of its limbs, snow-covered, was the slight evidence of a road.

“There’s our turn to Levey, my lord.”

“Banners!” Uwen ordered, as they turned onto that track beside the oak, and the banners, dark and bright, unfurled.

Crissand had said there was a shrine of sorts. Indeed, with the scouring of the morning’s wind, a small pile of man-set stones was peeping out from its snow blanket. It recalled one near Emwy village far to the west. That had been summer. The spring here was frozen where it flowed out of the natural rock, and had made a glorious mass of icicles.

“Padys Spring and the shrine, my lord. One of the last of the old places. The king’s men overthrew most, wherever they found them. I ask you’ll keep it. The village sets great store by it.”

“A shrine of the Bryalt?” he asked, largely ignorant of gods, study as he would in Efanor’s little book.

“Perhaps older, my lord. Though Bryalt offerings may turn up here, the king’s law and the Quinalt notwithstanding.” Crissand spoke in the hearing of Guelenmen, in Uwen’s hearing most of all, and was surely aware it. “We go uphill from here, a clear, smooth road, as I recall it, no ditches or pits to fear on either side.”

No track disturbing the snow since the last snowfall, either, but the blanket sank down considerably in a long line through the ridge, showing where the road was, and the stone sheep walls on either side, visible ahead of them, confirmed it. They rode past old stones, and many of the Guelenmen made a small sign against harm.

“The farmer folk are staunch Bryaltine,” Crissand began to say as they rode past.

But just as they passed under the spreading branches of the oak a fierce gust of wind blew past them, driving the banners sideways and startling the horses with a pelting of snow from laden branches.

Chapter 2

“Gods!” Crissand said in dismay, and reined up sharply… for an old woman stood by the shrine, so gray and brown in her shawl and skirts she might have been part of the oak in the last blink of their eyes. She had drawn her shawl over her gray head, but hanks of her hair flew in the gale and the driven snow. She had a necklace hung with smooth river stones and knots of straw. Her skirts were weighted with braided cords and coins, and the fringes of her shawl flew wild as the icy wind skirled up.

“Gods!” Crissand said a second time, with an anxious laugh, soothing his horse with his off hand. “You gave me a fright, mother. I don’t know you. Are you from Levey?”

She was no stranger and no common woman, Tristen knew it, and held Gery still: Uwen had halted beside him. So had all the column behind halted, and the banner-bearers ahead had turned back to face the woman in dismay.

“Auld Syes,” Tristen said, for to name a thing was to have some power to bid it. “What brings you so far from Emwy?”

“Why, I come to bring the lord of Amefel to his senses,” the old woman said, and pointed a bony bare arm from out of the clutch of flying fringes, stark and commanding as the wind continued to blow. “Lord of Amefel and the aetheling! Why do I find the twain of you riding west like common fools, when your road lies south? South for friends, lord of Amefel, north and east for foes, and blest the lord who knows one from the other! Mistake them not again, lord of Amefel!”

North for enemies and south for friends was no news; but east was Guelessar, and the king… and many another enemy, the barons not least. Tristen doubted nothing, and listened with ears and heart. Auld Syes had told him truth before.

And aetheling she said, the lord of Amefel and the aetheling, as if they were not the same thing… the twain of you, she said, lord and aetheling—which met his heart with a loud echo of all the wonderings he had had to himself. The guards who heard might not have heard that salutation in the same way: the common folk attributed both titles to him. Perhaps even Crissand failed to gather that implied duality.

But he did, and sat staunchly holding the red mare still between his knees, resolved not to flinch no matter the news out of the east.

“Lord of Amefel I am now. What shall I do for you, lady of Emwy?”

“Can truly you do aught, new lord? Have you true power, or is it only illusion you wield?”

A second shot winged home with an accuracy that might miss all attention but Uwen’s: Illusion was one of the two words hammered in silver on the blade of the sword he bore at his side; Truth was written on the other, in bright letters of long ago, and of all men present, only Uwen knew what the writing on the blade signified: Uwen, and this old woman.

Of a sudden he found himself afraid, trembling with the old woman’s challenge not in the gray space but on the earth and in it, and under his horse’s feet. The blade he had rarely drawn, that dark metal presence that generally lurked quiescent at his hearthside.

Truth… and illusion. He was both, and would she show him the division in himself?

“If I have power to grant anything for you, lady, that will I.”

“The living king at last sits in judgment. South, south, lord of Amefel, fare south today. And when you find my sparrows, my little birds, lord of Amefel, warm them, feed them. The wind is too cold.”

His bones shook. He could not obtain his next breath.

“Find my sparrows!” Auld Syes cried, or the wind cried to him. “Find my sparrows when you have found your friends!” A brutal gust slammed into the banners, tilting them despite the struggles of the bearers, who swung them into the teeth of the gale. Horses shied up, some fighting to bolt, but battle-trained Gery danced in place, head up, ears flat. Auld Syes still stood at the center of the gale, her fringes and her necklaces flying about her as the winds circled round and round her, winding her strings of amulets and charms, tangling their yarns. Streaks appeared in the snow around her, short, broad gouges that kicked up new-fallen snow, passing around and around her like the skips of dancers. Whatever veil Auld Syes had parted to reach into the world was closing with a vengeance, and other spirits flowed along the edges of her power, spirits more dangerous and less wise.

“Lad!” Uwen cried in alarm, and the wind dislodged snow from the oak above them, a thicker and thicker curtain of white that hid the old woman in its heart, a gray shadow.

“Auld Syes!” Tristen shouted, disturbed by this talk of sparrows, friends, and kings. “Auld Syes, I am not done with questions for you! May I hold you?”

“Bid me under your roof, lord of Amefel!” The voice was fading now, obscured in the wind. “Dare you do so?”

“Come at your will, Auld Syes!”

“Gods,” someone breathed. It might have been Crissand. It might have been Uwen. He himself invoked no more power than already roared about them as the veil of snow collapsed.

Then the wind slacked enough to clear the air, and to their eyes there was no woman, only tear-shaped streaks in a great broad ring, around and around where she had stood. Of Syes’ feet there was no track at all: pure and undisturbed, the snow lay in the center of that ring, and the snow that fell now in fat clumps plopped down onto the stacked stones. A plain clay bowl, filled with snow, sat atop that pile, as the bowls had stood on the altar table in the Quinaltine, this open to the sky and filled with a winter offering, to what gods was uncertain.

“Gods save us.” That was Lusin, chief of his guards, and Uwen with a rapid gesture signed safety to them all, a Guelenman, a Quinalt man by upbringing, asking, “Lad, are we safe here?”

“We ride south,” Tristen said, turning Gery’s head. “I think that was what she wanted.” He beheld guardsmen’s faces as shocked as Crissand’s. Snow had stuck to the sides of helmets and stuck in the eyelets of mail coats and the coats of the horses, while more was falling from the sky, thicker and thicker, not the knife edge of sleet, now, but soft, wet clumps that stuck where they landed. Banners hung limp, all in the shelter of the oak.

“This is the road to Levey,” Crissand said faintly and foolishly, as if his guidance were called in question along with their safety. “I am not mistaken in this.”

“Then our journey is not to Levey,” Tristen said, and by the folly of that protest guessed that Crissand was far yet from understanding Auld Syes or any other spirit that might go about her, some of them dangerous to more than life. “Ride back to the town, you and your men, before the weather becomes worse. Uwen and I will go on, with my guard. I can’t say what we may meet.”

“No, my lord! And the woman said, did she not, friends to the south? What should we fear?”

What indeed? Much, he answered the question in his own heart. “So she did,” he said aloud, “but I can’t speak to what sort of friends.”

The Guelenmen in the company, his own standard-bearers, and his four guards, looked more dismayed than Crissand and his men, and Uwen, who had met Auld Syes before this, bore a willing but worried frown.

“Last time she came, m’lord,” Uwen said, “there were no good event, and men died for’t.”

“Yet she never did us harm,” Tristen said. Truth: a king and a Regent had fallen, and men had died at her first appearance; at her second appearance, which Uwen had not seen, he had been in peril of his own life, but he had found Ninévrisë as a result of it.

Now he saw no choice: Auld Syes warned them, yes, but to his understanding of her nature she was not responsible for what then followed. And with a touch of his heels on Gery’s sides, he threaded the column back through itself to reach the main road.

There he turned south, and Sergeant Gedd and the two other men carrying the banners urged their horses through low drifts and up the side of a ditch to get to the fore of him. The Guelenmen were bound by their honor and the king’s order to go on if he would; but true to his word and also for honor’s sake, Crissand and his men did not part their company, either. No more did he forbid them as Crissand came riding up the slant of the ditch to catch up with him and Uwen, the Amefin captain trailing him and slipping on the steep.

Snow began to fall more finely and more quickly from the sky, graying all the world as the wind swept down with a renewed vengeance, scouring blasts that carried so much snow that in a moment the trees of the apple orchard stood like gray ghosts, and the low wall was a faint shadow. The standard-bearers had never yet furled the banners. Now they rode with them tilted doggedly forward as if they defied the wind itself, a knife-edged and formless enemy that whisked their cloaks away from their bodies while they struggled two-handed and half-blind to keep the banners from being torn away.

“Furl the standards!” Tristen called out to them, dismayed at such gallant folly. What did they think they fought? he asked himself; and the next gust shook even the horses, and in better sense than their masters they tried to turn their backs; but riders forced them around into it by rein and heel. Meanwhile the imperiled banners came safely in, and the banner-bearers snatched their cloaks about their bodies. The cold had grown bitter. Crissand struggled with his coif and the reins and an escaping cloak edge, and Tristen was glad of both coif and heavy cloak.

“We’ll be off the road in another such,” Uwen said through chattering teeth. “An’ fallin’ in the ditch an’ not found till spring. I hope to the gods ye can see our way, m’lord; I can’t.”

Tristen knew his way, sure at least that he knew where south was, but he pitied the men and the horses. He had never truly dared the gray space with Auld Syes, and only for his men’s sake and justice did he try it now. “Auld Syes!” he said aloud, here and there alike, to whatever might be listening. “We’re doing as you wish! What more will you? Is this your doing, Auld Syes?”

The wind had a voice, and it spoke, but not so any man could understand it. What Auld Syes would and would not was without care for mortal discomfort or men’s lives… so he feared: Auld Syes had made her effort and had left them to their fate.

But one there was not immune to pity.

“Seddiwy!” he called out. “Speak kindly to your mother!” For as he thought of it, Auld Syes’ daughter might well be in this capricious upheaval of the elements, a shadow, certainly, if she still played skip and raced about the old woman’s skirts. The wind itself might be a child’s game, a game of shadows, sometimes prankish, sometimes deadly to her mother’s foes… small willful child in dangerous company.

But potent child, for all that.

“Seddiwy! Cease this!”

It seemed someone heard, for the gale fell away so suddenly that the wall of wind against which they leaned was suddenly absent. Gery threw her head up, whinnied at the empty air, and gave a little skip in startlement.

Crissand set a hand behind him and looked all about, as if looking for apparitions or worse.

“She’s a shadow,” Tristen said, “a little girl. She means no harm to us. The elements are overturned with her mother’s goings and comings, at least that may be the cause.”

“A little girl!”

“A mischievous one. But good-hearted.”

“I take you at your word, my lord.” Crissand’s voice was hushed and thin, and no less than the guards and the other captain, Uwen looked warily about him… justly so: more than a child might manifest about Auld Syes.

But now that the gusts had ceased, the snow began to congeal in great soft lumps as it fell, so that now they could see the road and the roll of the ditches alongside it quite clearly through a veil of fat, white puffs.

“There’s a moment,” Crissand said at last, breathlessly, in their apparent rescue. “There’s a moment I shan’t forget so long as I live. Good gods, you keep uncommon allies, my lord.”

“She’s Amefel’s ally,” Tristen said, for so it had always seemed to him. The air was less cold where they rode, now, yet a glance confirmed a shadow, an impression of dark in the all-enveloping gray, boding storm in the west. “Uwen’s right that she’s warned of ambushes before now. She spoke to me in the woods at Emwy near such a spring, and it may be, such a shrine.”

He suspected he had never told that to Uwen, and did not explain now, but brought all his faculties to bear on the road southward, searching through the white distance and testing within the gray space unseen to the rest of them whether there was any presence on the road behind or ahead.

He felt all the cold-stung men beside him quite clearly, the faint and distant presence of what must be Levey village away and to the west.

He felt Gery under him and the horses around him, and he felt the dim presence of living things out across the orchards, small creatures, perhaps a rabbit in its burrow, or in a brush heap. Auld Syes spoke of sheltering birds; but he knew it to mean something else, and urgent, as he distractedly hoped for the safety of his birds and all creatures who had set out so blithely unforeseeing a storm such as this.

He had not foreseen it. Emuin had not. And all the wizard-sense he owned felt something ominous in the west this hour, something that otherwise should make them turn now and fare home quickly, to put themselves behind walls and wards.

And now he recalled how he had felt foreboding even before he had set out from Guelessar: a sense of threat, from a hill above the king’s forest.

Do you find anything amiss? he had asked Emuin today, and had no answer, only talk of beeswax candles.

And why? Why indeed? And why no warning of storm or magic today, when the like of Auld Syes arrived out of the winter with warnings and directions to venture out?

He was not comforted, even while he pressed red Gery forward in the snow.

—Do you hear me, sir? he asked Emuin. Do you yet hear me? Do you know what’s happened?

Was it anger that moved him? He was close to it, beset like this and taken without warning. He had found baffling Emuin’s deserting the king to come with him in the first place, and yet never having advice for him, nor even traveling with him on the road.

He found Emuin’s dereliction more and more portentous and troubling in light of Auld Syes’ appearance just now, and still he rode through this storm telling himself that, of course, wizards had their ways and their necessary silences.

Oh, yes, Emuin had warned him… warned him Emuin feared his wishes and his will, and wished him to use either as sparingly as possible. So it was perfectly understandable that Emuin kept silent on all manner of things.

But something, perhaps even the extremity of the effort, had sent Auld Syes away with an appeal to him to invite her past the wards that surrounded him, and now violence boded in the west, and still Emuin said nothing, though others had acted. This was beyond prudence regarding what he would do. This silence encompassed what others intended, and he grew vastly out of sorts with it.

Conversation had meanwhile ceased among the guardsmen behind him, except the Guelenmen asked in the quiet of the fall was there ever the like, and the Amefin swore they had never seen anything to equal this weather.

“Are we still in Meiden lands?” Uwen wanted to know, and, yes, the Amefin captain said, they were still in his lord’s lands, but only scarcely. Past the next brook Meiden’s lands ceased, and the aged earl of Athel held sway.

It was a distant sound to him, their talk, in the strange quiet of the snowfall, like the floating silence of a dream, as if some magic had made an isle of calm around them and kept the dark of the storm elsewhere at bay. Seddiwy’s lingering mischief or merely the troubling of nature Auld Syes had wrought, flurries of white appeared, but confined themselves to the hills and the horizon, small opaque patches beyond which they could not see.

They rode thus for an hour, at least, in such gentle snowfall, meeting no great accumulation on the road, which seemed unnaturally spared of the drifts that deepened on the hills, and the men’s wonder informed him that, no, this was not the ordinary conduct of snowstorms.

They began to ride out of their area of peace as they rode into the sheep-meadows of the southern hills. A wind almost as fierce as the first stung their faces with sleet like icy sand and made the horses go with half-shut eyes and flattened ears.

“How far shall we ride?” some guardsman complained, and Uwen said, “Far as His Grace wishes it, man. Bear wi’ it.”

Soon now, was Tristen’s increasing conviction. And now it seemed to him that the opposing storm was not all troubled nature, but that someone, somewhere, troubled nature deliberately, opposing Auld Syes, never wishing her to speak to him: she had asked his summons, his leave, which opened his wards to her, as a fugitive might ask a door be left unlocked.

It was dangerous, what she had asked; so was what he had granted; and yet thus far the only penalty of his venture was a dusting of snow and the chill that numbed and made decision difficult. Someone else, someone opposed to Auld Syes, instead of Seddiwy, might have roused this weather to make things difficult, but had no power or no desire to make it worse, and that someone else might even be master Emuin, angry at the venture, but he did not think so.

With sudden sureness, however, he knew the friends Auld Syes had warned him of were just the other side of the hill. Awareness of a presence reached through the gray of his Sight and into his heart… a faint glow about Crissand and another such glow of presence in the storm-blown haze ahead of them, blue and soft, advisory of wizard-gift.

There, his heart said. It was someone uncommon.

And a friend? Almost he dared guess, and his heart lifted. Welcome, he said to the white before them, and just then, on a hill made invisible by the blowing white, shadows of riders appeared as if in midair, three riders who approached them, each with a second, shadowy horse at lead.

Then came four, five, and two more out of the white, men whose colors were the snow and the storm themselves.

Gray cloaks and mingled gray horses, the foremost horse near to white. And, yes, here indeed were friends, Ivanim, from the province neighboring to the south.

Perhaps they had set out north as a courtesy to him, once the news of his accession in Amefel had reached Ivanor: that was the natural thought.

Yet did something so simple come heralded by Auld Syes, at such effort?

Clearer and clearer they came, both sides continuing to move, and the foremost rider proved no less than the lord of Ivanor himself, Cevulirn… who should not have been in the south at all, but eastward, in Guelessar, with Cefwyn.

That portended something in itself ominous.

“Ivanor!” Tristen called out, though the men with him made pious gestures against ghosts and shadows.

“Is it Tristen?” came the answering shout.

There was no need to break out the banners for reassurance in this murk, but Gedd had done so; and now the banners of Ivanor came forth, the White Horse; and Crissand’s own, Sun on a blue whitened like ice.

“Welcome,” Tristen called out to the lord of Ivanor, as their two parties met. He offered Cevulirn his hand as they met, the clasp of gauntlets well dusted with snow and frozen stiff with ice. “Welcome, sir. But how does Cefwyn fare?”

“Safely wedded, so I had word. I lingered at Clusyn monastery to know, on my way home. And how are matters in Henas’amef?”

“Very well. Very well, sir.” It struck him only then that other courtesies were due, and he made them, self-conscious in his new lordship. “Your Grace, Crissand, Earl of Meiden; our friend, the duke of Ivanor.”

“I’ve seen you in hall,” Crissand said, “but as my father’s son. Lord Cevulirn, count me your friend as devotedly as you are my lord’s friend.”

“Your Grace,” Cevulirn said. That Crissand was earl had told a tale in itself, one Cevulirn would have no trouble reading: a father’s death, the son’s accession to the earldom, but there was no leisure here for asking and answering further than that. The wind tugged at cloaks and pried with icy fingers into every gap, and they were standing hard-worked horses in a chilling storm. “I take it your journey is to me,” Tristen said above the buffeting of the gale, for there was nowhere else of note this road led, before it came to Henas’amef. “You’re very welcome, you and your men. Shall we have the horses moving?”

“Indeed,” Cevulirn said, and they reined about and Cevulirn with them. The wind came more comfortably at their backs as Tristen began to thread his own column again back through itself, and Ivanim sorted themselves out among Guelenmen and Amefin.

“Does His Majesty need me in Guelemara?” Tristen asked, first and clearest of his worries once they were faced about and headed home. “Are you here because things are going well, or because they aren’t?”

“Well and ill. His Majesty sent me south for my health. It’s high time His Majesty’s friends put their heads together.”

Cevulirn did not readily give up words, not before strangers, most of all. He only knew that Cevulirn had purposed to stay by the king this winter, to report to the southern lords any untoward demand of their rivals of the north, and to make it clear to the ambitious north that the south would not see its interests trampled. Yet Cevulirn had heard of the wedding only from the vantage of the monastery at Clusyn, and had come home contrary to his firm intentions.

So whatever had happened in the capital, it was not according to plan.

“Earl Crissand is trustworthy,” Tristen said. “What do you mean we should put our heads together?”

“The northerners are rid of me,” came the answer. “As they are of you, and yet they could not prevent the wedding. So at least half their plans came to naught, but gods know what Ryssand’s done.”

“Surely lightning hasn’t struck the Quinalt.” He was half in jest, but that was how the barons had been rid of him: he could not imagine how they had proceeded against Cevulirn, who was one of the greatest men in the land.

“Would lightning had struck Ryssand. No. But I struck him a grievous hurt, hence my ride south, hence a winter for us to arrange things more to His Majesty’s liking. Hence my visit to you. How have you fared here?”

There was far too much to tell, and much of it bitter to Crissand, of whose witness he was entirely conscious. “Well enough,” Tristen said, “considering all that’s happened. Meiden lost a good many men. There were Guard killed. I sent Lord Parsynan out afoot, since he stole Uwen’s horse; and I sent His Majesty’s wagons to the border to fortify the bridges—or I had sent them this morning. The weather may have prevented them going.”

“Have you, indeed?” Cevulirn’s tone was flat, implying neither approval nor disapproval, only, for him, query. “Has there been difficulty there?”

It was another matter that touched heavily on Crissand’s pride.

“My father, sir,” Crissand said before he could speak, “had correspondence with Tasmôrden. The rebels offered to come in to support rebellion, and rebellion there was, to my father’s grief and misfortune, sir.”

“But no sight of Elwynim,” Tristen said. “Yet I fortify the bridges, and kept the Guard, having no Amefin troops. The wagons… Cefwyn can spare them a fortnight more, so I hope, if nothing happens northerly.”

“A fair risk,” Cevulirn said after a moment of silence, leaving Tristen less than certain Cevulirn approved all he had done.

“Cefwyn told me,” he said, “that he wishes to attack Tasmôrden from the eastern bridges and not the south, for glory to the northern barons. And I’ve no wish to take any glory at all, or to have another battle at planting time, when the last was at harvest.”

So Crissand had just told him, but Crissand was by no means the first to explain that with men drawn away from their farmsteads season after season, no crops grew and the lambing this spring would already go hard… he had not drawn men off the land, not yet. Amefel’s losses had been heaviest, at Lewenbrook, a muster of peasant farmers and herders, where other provinces had sent well-trained troops.

“So I don’t intend to cross the river,” he said, “but I intend they shan’t cross here, either.”

“His Majesty’s plan is to set Murandys and Ryssand and Guelessar in the field, all the heavy horse and all the gear,” Cevulirn said. “It’s the warfare Guelenfolk know. And I’ve urged His Majesty have a thought to the light horse, and getting a force over those roads, which by all Her Grace has said are none so fine and broad as those in Guelessar. Mud. And difficulty for those wagons His Majesty sets such store by, with all that heavy gear. March to Ilefínian and bring them to bloody battle… with all respect to your good captain, Amefel: the heavy horse will suffer in that plan, every league they travel. It’s too far a march, too many hills that give vantage to archers.”

“A bloody passage it’ll be,” Uwen said in a low voice, for Cevulirn he knew well. “An’ I agree wi’ Your Grace, and wi’ my lord, I’d send the light horse.”

“I’ve said the same,” Tristen said.

“But that’s not the king’s wish in the matter,” Cevulirn said, “for his Guelenfolk. So bloodily they’ll win through, granted Ryssand doesn’t stab our king in the back. The king sets all hope on Ryssand and Murandys, where least it should rest, and here am I in the south, where least I should rest, and His Majesty never so in danger from a knife in the dark when he was sleeping in Henas’amef, his guards notwithstanding.”

A great deal was amiss. Tristen heard that very clearly as they rode. Cefwyn had wished to set Ninévrisë on her throne with no war at all, deeming the rebels broken at Lewenbrook. But a lesser lord, Tasmôrden, had leapt to the fore of the rebellion, and the rebels that had not yet crossed into Cefwyn’s battlefield had simply swept aside and fortified a camp inside Elwynor, raising an army out of the stones there, as best they could surmise: certainly it had taxed the villages hard to raise the force it was now.

Set Ninévrisë on her throne Cefwyn would.

But Cefwyn averred he had no choice but exclude the south from the war and call this time on the north. Ryssandish folk and Guelenmen were the heart of his Guelen kingdom: the south was of tainted blood… had he not heard it from Cefwyn’s lips?

And did that not still shiver through his memory? So thoroughly had Cefwyn remembered he was Guelen, and wanted their favor, when he could have called on the likes of Cevulirn and Sovrag. Having Cevulirn and Sovrag with him, he had sent home the Olmernmen; and him; and now Cevulirn?

The gray space remained untroubled; Tristen’s heart did not.

Was it a visit without meaning, that Auld Syes guided? He thought not. They two were the king’s friends, and Crissand had pledged himself through him, and so all the earls of Amefel, and Auld Syes herself had heralded Cevulirn’s coming to him. Was it without meaning?

He was Lord Marshal of Althalen, Lord Warden of Ynefel, titles all but lost in his assumption of the dukedom of Amefel… meaningless and vacant of inhabitants, men said.

Men said. But might those be the honors Auld Syes called him to attend… when she as good as hailed Crissand aetheling?

The King he come again, she had said to Prince Cefwyn in his hearing, and that lanced through his memory like a lightning stroke.

Had not Uleman, who stood for a King, Lord Regent of Elwynor, also come to Amefel, and died? Young king, Uleman had called him, when he was dying, but in the gray space all things had questionable meaning. Uleman had charged him with defense of the innocent, Uleman, who lay now in ward of Althalen, a power not quite departed from the earth. Cefwyn made him lord here, in Amefel… the keystone in the arch that held Elwynor off Ylesuin’s soil.

“Look, will ye?” he heard Uwen say as they passed the hill and rode down past the road to Levey, and all through the ranks men blessed themselves or spoke softly to their gods, for the old oak had fallen, its roots uptorn from the muddy ground, great clods fallen all about, and the branches cracked and ruined.

“Ain’t no wind might topple an oak wi’ that girth,” a Guelenman said. “Gods bless, here were sorcery.”

“Quiet wi’ your ’sorcery‘!” Uwen said sharply. “Wet ground an’ a gale an’ an old tree, aye, and a wizard-woman, but sorcery’s another thing altogether. My lord don’t dabble in that, so careful how ye use words.”

“Gods bless us all the same,” said Crissand, and Tristen regarded the uprooted oak, the very symbol of Amefel, asking himself whether wind could in fact have done it.

“An uncommon sight, to be sure,” was Cevulirn’s judgment.

“So the witch that foretold your journey stood there, Your Grace,” said Crissand, “and warned us to look for you, and now see the ruin of the tree.”

“There’s nothing here now,” Tristen said, “nothing harmful, nothing of threat. It’s a very great tree to be rooted up. But the lady of Emwy is no slight matter either. Ride by.”

That they did, and curious as he was and questioning in his own mind what might have befallen the oak, he did not unsettle his men further by turning in the saddle to gawk like an innocent. He was the stay of the guardsmen’s confidence and their courage to confront strange things, and there were strange things enough for a week of gossip once they all reached town.

There was one more strange sight on the other side of the next hill, for their tracks, hitherto utterly blotted out by the snowfall, reappeared, never covered by any fall there, nor all along that earlier part of their road. The storm had never reached there, and they could see all the land before them from that height, with a thick snowfall behind them and none before.

“Not a natural storm,” the soldiers said with anxious looks at the west, which still showed dark. “There weren’t nothin’ natural about it.”

“As we met fair weather,” Cevulirn remarked, “until an hour before our meeting.”

“I think the carts must have gone out, after all,” Tristen said, for he had been convinced until now that Anwyll’s party could not possibly have set out into the teeth of that storm.

But nothing here would have prevented it.

—Master Emuin? he asked the nearest wizard he knew. It’s snowed, have you noticed? Or did snow fall at all in town? I think it did not.

—Have you ever seen an oak overthrown, master Emuin? Some might take it for ominous, and surely the soldiers do. What shall I tell them?

No answer came to him, but that was, lately, no great surprise, though disheartening. At the same time he heard Lusin and Gedd saying to each other, with better cheer, well, that was a relief, no drifts between them and a warm fire.

It was a leaden sunset in the west and a blue evening in the northwest shot through with fire as they came up to the walls, over the tracks of farmers and the heavy tracks of the departed wagons.

They rode through the gates in close order, Lord Crissand making quiet, last-moment converse with Lord Cevulirn, explaining the streets were quiet and peaceful, and their visitor should fear no rebellion. They were well within the town, before the gatekeepers, caught by surprise, began to ring the bell that advised the hill fortress of visitors.

Then the curious began to peer out of shops and windows. The return of their party from a venture all the town had seen go out might not have drawn any but the hardiest out of doors on a frosty evening. But the bell drew attention, and the banners had unfurled, the White Horse of Ivanor among the banners belonging to the town and its own lords, and townsfolk threw on cloaks and mittens and came out into doorways, or peered out from well-situated windows, for not since summer had the White Horse banner been seen in the streets, when Cevulirn among other lords of the south had camped in that broad expanse outside.

Loaded carts had gone out for the border, where war was bruited about, a great lord had come guesting with their new lord and the new lord of Meiden… it surely made for talk, on an evening remarkable only for a light snowfall.

Chapter 3

The herald trumpets faded tremulously from the air, the harpers harped, the pipers piped, and the king and Royal Consort, settling on their dais in the great hall, looked out over the assembled nobles of Ylesuin, as happy as a bride and groom might be, who knew what all their guests were thinking. The king sat above the stone Ryssand had installed under the Dragon Throne, a lasting and symbolic legacy of Ryssand’s attempts to prevent the wedding. That stone remained, though Ryssand was gone at least for a season; that stone would acquire the voice of baronial anguish if removed, for removing that handbreadth height would lower the king of Ylesuin to the height of his bride’s chair of state, and that would unravel all the convolute and, in the end, bloody agreements that had let the court accept the marriage.

In Cefwyn’s glum reckoning, the presence of that stone would only grow more, not less, a necessity, wearing itself into habit and memory until the damned thing was all but sacred. The majesty of Ylesuin must sit higher than his wife Her Grace of Elwynor, or northern baronial noses would be sorely out of joint, and when the barons’ noses were out of joint then the barons would gather in corners and whisper, which at the moment and only of very late date, they dared not do without careful smiles on their faces and occasional sweet-faced bows toward enthroned majesty.

So all in all, the cursed stone was likely to remain, preserving Guelen pride and making it clear that the woman beside the king, his wife, his consort, his bride, and the love of his heart, was not the queen of Ylesuin.

In fact ever since he had come back from Amefel and the fighting at Lewenbrook to inform the barons that his father was dead and he was king, and that he had, moreover, betrothed himself to the daughter and heir of their old enemy, the Regent of Elwynor, he had met a resistance not only greater than he had anticipated, but more clever and dangerous than he had imagined. He had thought these men simply agreeable to his late father’s unpleasant opinions, had realized too little and too late how very extensively these men were accustomed to having their will of his father and directing those opinions… and nowadays he wondered how many of the worst decisions of his father’s reign had been his father’s and how many were in fact Ryssand’s instigation.

Certainly he had come to court in blither certainty and confidence of the world than he held now. Yet it was Ryssand, ultimately, who had rued the clash of wills… and Cefwyn could congratulate himself on having had his way in all meaningful things. Save this one.

Save this one, for at last, on the eve of the wedding and with the Quinalt granting all else and reconciled to performing the ceremony, he had slipped in the word queen, and a small delegation of lords and priests had presented him in turn the last, the most stringent and inflexible objection of the clergy: royal expectation aside, there had never quite been a queen of Ylesuin, even counting his father’s mother and his, and Efanor’s, and the Quinalt had come armed with chapter and verse to prove its case, a veritable parade of clerks and clerics.

It was true. It might be Cefwyn’s argument that the omission was never intended for precedent, only that his grandmother had died before his grandfather’s rule began and his mother and Efanor’s mother had both been of Guelen burgesses and not royal, only wellborn. It was circumstance, not intent, in his argument, that had kept Ylesuin from having a queen, but that mattered little, when down to the day and in the toppling of all other obstacles, they had come to dicing words and titles and listening to long recitations of clerkly records. Facing the possibility of another disaffection of the Quinalt Patriarch, whom he had bought in costly coin of favors given, Cefwyn had had to admit that perhaps the reluctance to crown the king’s wife was not an insurmountable slight to his bride, who would reign in Elwynor with or without the acknowledgment of Ylesuin, and who was, moreover, pleading with him to accept that slight and get on to the wedding. What she wanted for herself and her people was the alliance, and an army potent enough to drive Tasmôrden from his siege of her capital. She wanted no delays and she wanted that army to set its first contingents in order at the bridges immediately after the wedding. To that he agreed, for the situation in Elwynor had been growing grim then and was growing grimmer to this hour.

She would reign, indeed, as he willed: as they did not make her queen, so they could not trammel up her claim to the Regency of Elwynor, and he would provide—was providing—the army even tonight with his first forces camped on riverside.

And it would be her kingdom, separate from his. That was the unfortunate seed in what his barons had done: they had made it impossible for him to persuade her, win her, contrary to the provisions of the marriage treaty, to an early union of their kingdoms. She had insisted on her independency and her own lordship over neighboring Elwynor in the nuptial agreement… and that, most precisely, she had, thanks to the barons, without any possibility of argument on his part. Reign she would, in her land, during the summers, so they planned, leaving winters to a vice regent in her land, and gods hope they could ply rowboats between often enough or they would both go mad.

The raising of armies and the defense of their separate kingdoms aside, they loved one another madly, passionately, and to the edge, but not quite over the brink, of complete folly, and their passion had not abated since the wedding night. There was no having enough of one another. They were entirely happy in their nest upstairs. They would neither one act to the detriment of their separate kingdoms… but their fingers met whenever they found the chance, and had he ever seen eyes light as hers did whenever he came within her presence?

Gods, how had he lived his life this far without her?

They still walked through their dream of candlelight and flowers, at least in private. They still existed in the singing and the bells, and saw the garlands and the bright banners that were all he in good truth remembered of the wedding… well, there had been the satisfying and uncommon sight of certain of his unhappy barons trying valiantly to smile through the ceremony, and the equally uncommon sight of the Quinalt Patriarch’s cousin Sulriggan, Duke of Llymaryn, positively aglow with happiness: Sulriggan’s return from near exile having been the coin for the Patriarch’s acceptance of Her Grace, the two were not unrelated circumstances.

That glow on Sulriggan’s countenance continued to this very hour.

Looking out over the barons who were in attendance this evening, he saw the same sources of discontent, and expressions of gloom on those he had destined for retribution when he found the means… policy, not utter self-indulgence: the barons would learn him, or by the gods make way for those who would.

One of those acts of retribution, in fact, he would deal out this very evening, and contemplating that prospect, he could sit on the cursed stone and smile down on his court in honest contentment. Conspiracies to overthrow him would come to nothing, while he held a certain damning letter and while he had the loyalty of such as Tristen of Amefel and Cevulirn and the rest of the lords of the south. Even the middle lands had gained courage from the resolute muster of the south this summer’s end, and might see their own affairs as safer in the hands of a strong monarch than in the hands of the northern tier of self-serving barons.

Unlikeliest allies of all, he now had the Patriarch and Lord Sulriggan to draw upon… securely bought, and safe so long as they stayed by the agreement: perhaps intruding just a little far upon his patience, but they were learning one another’s limits.

Sulriggan was clinging close to Efanor, whose friendship he again courted… and would not win. Efanor was once betrayed, and would not listen. Dubious prize as Sulriggan was in most points of courage on a battlefield, however, in the conflicts within the court the man was as agile and as clever as one might ask. That generous nose of Sulriggan’s could gather impending shifts in the wind with great sensitivity, and his cowardice in the field manifested as a sensible discretion of utterance once he knew his own interests were at stake.

Most central to all considerations of behavior, the lord of Llymaryn had learned once and for all that his wastrel prince would not sit the throne as a lax and tolerant sovereign… having not his father’s inclination to agree to every document that reached his desk, some unread.

Nor, Sulriggan had discovered, did his prince, now king, like the sight of unwarranted expense, even extravagance of dress, when he had a war to fund and lords obliged to arm and equip their share of it.

Accordingly Sulriggan, the bane of his stay in Amefel, the lord who had mortally offended him, was modestly dressed tonight, a Quinalt sigil piously and ostentatiously displayed about his neck… clearly to remind everyone who his cousin was.

A marriage banquet was a time for forgiving and forgetting. And Sulriggan was not the only member of the court to return to grace. Tonight marked another act of royal clemency and courtly redemption.

Oh, indeed Prichwarrin, Lord Murandys, was here… Prichwarrin, whose niece, Luriel, was that second matter of royal compassion tonight. Luriel had indeed arrived in Guelemara, in court, and on this evening, all exactly as her sovereign had requested. Luriel would have walked here barefoot through snowdrifts at that invitation, Cefwyn was quite sure, quite as surely as Prichwarrin, Lord Murandys would have walked barefoot through hell to prevent it.

The pipers played a lively tune, and Cefwyn, reaching aside for his bride’s hand, met eyes (gray with a deception of violet) that danced with candlelight. What more than such a look could a man want, and what need a king fear from any former love, when love so sure and serene looked back at him? If there was anything more than love a man dared wish in a bride, he had it all in Ninévrisë, and the thought of offense to her was the only consideration that remotely gave him pause tonight.

Not queen, indeed, but Royal Consort… the Quinalt and the barons had denied her the queenship, but in a last round of argument had agreed to royal, acknowledging the difference between burghers’ daughters and a sovereign with her own lands to rule. It was not queen, and the lords were satisfied; it was a distinct precedent, and he was satisfied, for Ninévrisë had, in the absence of good Quinalt records, no proof of any royal descent… a ridiculous objection. The house of Syrillas, her house, might be a lineage older than his own… a lineage older, and magic-gifted and gods-knew-what-else that the orthodoxy of the Quinalt had rather not know or acknowledge it knew. But the house of Syrillas had not been listed in the Quinalt’s documents, so it had not been royal until the Quinalt wrote it down, sealed, and incontrovertible in Quinalt records for all cases yet to come.

So her dignity was assured in whatever challenges his quarrels with the barons might bring… safe as the sanctity of the Quinaltine Patriarch, such as it was, purchasable as it was: lo, Sulriggan, now beaming with his restoration, and perhaps about to advance to the throne at this very moment to express his gratitude.

Appalling sight, and one he had as lief not face. He stood, to forestall that predatory advance, drew his Royal Consort to her feet, and called to the musicians for a romantic paselle. With Ninévrisë he descended the dais to the floor, and the heraldic and festive array of the court spun slowly, gracefully, beautifully into a pause before him.

The music sparkled into the courtly and intricate dance, as couples bowed aside from them and gave them the floor to themselves.

Ninévrisë danced with grace and delighted assurance. Cefwyn counted himself at least no discommoding partner; and the sparkle and flash of dower jewels by candle-gleam scarcely equaled the amused flash of her eyes as the dance wove them past one another and arm in arm and hand in hand and out and back again in this public display, this challenge to the interests that had tried to prevent this night. The single petticoat which had so scandalized the court did so again, with the king as willing accomplice, and Ninévrisë was the center of all attention, all gossip, all estimation… what would she do? What would she say? ran the hall like a current under the music.

And when the dance was done he lingered to bestow on his bride a very public and passionate kiss that wrung first a murmur of dismay and then laughter and applause from no few young folk of the court. Laughter of that sort was their friend if they could countenance it without blushing; and along with the wilder, less pious young folk, it was the burgess wives that most accepted Ninévrisë’s royalty, they, and the rural lords and their common-born ladies, most older women, wed above their station in a day when customs were more forgiving than in this modern narrowness of doctrine. Many of the old midlands couples understood a lovers’ kiss within marriage, and approved and applauded with the young folk; and many knew, too, what the great lords of the north had done to prevent the marriage. Certainly the northern lords’ applause was late and limp and brief.

“This is my bride,” he said defiantly to the assembled court, holding forth their joined hands. “This is my very dear bride,” he said as they ascended the dais a second time, and he turned to face the court. “My bride whose forces fought beside us at Lewenbrook…” It was not quite so, since her few men had perished before the main battle, but it was a good turn of speech and true as far as noble sacrifice. “This is our neighbor, this true and pious and puissant lady, sole heir of the house of Syrillas, joined in love and amity to the Marhanen line. Peace, peace and an end to the wars that have been the rule of all our years; peace on our borders, good hope to our descendants, justice to the righteous, and reward to the pious…” This last was for the priests. “Gods bless Ylesuin!”

“Gods bless the king,” was the appropriate response, which came from one throat first, then in a general murmur that might cloak any less enthusiastic recital on the part of, say, Murandys.

Ninévrisë’s black-robed priest yonder, so conspicuous in his darkness by the pillar, saluted them, too, wine cup in hand, gods help them… not that he had lacked a full cup at the common supper. Father Benwyn was a Bryaltine, that one priest given sober charge of Her Grace’s soul in spiritual counsel; a male priest, most specifically, from a creed at least recognized by the Quinalt records. It satisfied the Patriarch, gave him a way to avoid admitting the priesthood of women, and necessitated no further bending of the already ravaged rules. Get me a Bryaltine, Cefwyn had said, in haste and urgency on almost the last night before the wedding, so we can sign this damned agreement.

But, good gods, Cefwyn thought, could they not have found me a sober one?

Gods bless the king, indeed. There might not be another Bryaltine within the court, except this one… maybe not another this side of Assurnbrook: Bryaltines did not prosper among Guelenfolk, and did not expect converts. That one existed at all had been a relief.

He signed quietly to a page, leaned forward. “Bid the guard assist Father Benwyn to his quarters. Give him a pitcher there.”

That would keep him safely in the room and snoring until dawn, gods willing.

And that cleared the way for the other loneliest man at court: Prichwarrin, who occupied a place by a column, and not a soul willing to come close to him and converse, either.

The king and Royal Consort had had their dance, and satisfied custom by public celebration, proclaiming the royal marriage a sennight old and, by implication, consummated. This exhibition of the blissful couple was the Guelen custom, from throne to village commons, in varying degrees of drunken revelry… hence, too, the ready applause of the country gentry, whose tradition was all but bawdy. The rustic romantics of the court, none of them, alas, in ducal office, had come in their simplicity to sigh over their happiness, the sots like Father Benwyn had come to sup wine and eat… the young folk had come to dance and show their finery; and the great dukes who had survived the royal betrothal with their influence intact had gathered to plot next steps around Prichwarrin’s fate.

For something had to happen. The king had paid many of his debts, but not the one that was on carefully shielded lips and in the whispers that ran beneath the music. A lady had come to this festivity, ostensibly to celebrate with the rest, but was not in the hall… and now, now or surely soon came that matter of retribution and satisfaction. The whole court knew that the king had summoned his former, unwed, and disgraced lover to court to meet his bride on this festive occasion, a matter for the delectation of every scandalmonger and gossip in court.

And it lent some hope of seeing Ninévrisë of Elwynor offended: that, too, in the harder, colder eyes of the great ladies of the realm.

But Ninévrisë smiled and talked to a page who offered her water in a crystal vessel. The pipers and harpers, following custom, had immediately begun a dance in which all could join. Movement swirled through the hall, the glitter of jewels and the rich color of festive finery as couples made their lines, still casting looks toward the dais to be sure they missed nothing.

And sure enough, amid the flash and gleam of brocades and velvets Cefwyn coldly caught Prichwarrin’s eye, and this time beckoned, the slight crook of a finger, the true potency of a crowned, wedded, and lingeringly angry monarch. The second most powerful lord in the north cast his king an anxious look, as if there could be any doubt of the summons, then slunk forward from the side of the room, past the dancers, doubtless hoping for anonymity beneath the music.

But lords and ladies about the fringes of the hall spied that movement and their hawk-sharp stares attracted others, so that heads turned in a moving silence that spread across the hall. Even the dancers craned and maneuvered for view amid their turns, then slowed, and the fine order of the complex dance was broken. The pipers, just having begun, squalled off to silence.

Silence and attention was not what Lord Prichwarrin had wanted. The lord of Murandys had rather be snowbound in a drift twixt here and Sassury as standing before his monarch, the cynosure of every conversation and movement in the hall.

Cefwyn reached to the side and across the arm of his chair to rest his hand, publicly and pointedly, on his Elwynim bride’s hand, while Prichwarrin, at the foot of the dais and standing even farther below his king by reason of the stone block his ally, Ryssand, had insisted on, looked as if he had something caught in his throat, something he foreknew would be indigestible… perhaps even fatal.

“Lord Murandys.”

“Your Majesty,” Prichwarrin said, and such was Lord Murandys’ disarray and so deep was his isolation and his fear at the moment that he even added, “Your Grace,” for Ninévrisë, and nearly choked on it.

“Lord Prichwarrin,” Cefwyn said, his hand thus set on Ninévrisë’s. “We were anticipating your lovely niece. We were given to understand she had come from your capital. Is she here?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Then in what doubt does she delay?”

It was all a show of relative powers, his, and Prichwarrin’s. He, Ninévrisë, and everyone in the hall knew very well that Luriel had come to court, and why she had come to court, and under what cloud she had come to court. As his Lord Commander of the Guard, that black crow, Idrys, had informed him from the very beginning of the evening, the lady was awaiting a summons in the outer hall, but the great lords of the north and their ladies behaved as if they truly believed their king and his bride were ignorant of her presence and her waiting.

He might at any moment choose to become so, of course, thus wrecking the lady and setting Prichwarrin in a yet more uncomfortable position, one from which he must defy the king or deal with the scandal in his house.

Perhaps, the listening courtiers must think, that was the intent here, and they were about to witness a destruction… perhaps Her Grace’s revenge on a rival.

Yet Lady Luriel had traveled to Guelemara on her hope and on her high pride, bravely so, for there was no private royal assurance what her welcome would be, whether cruel, public disgrace, or (some even whispered) to take up her former position within the court and within reach of the king’s bedroom, to the bride’s sure discomfort. Certain women and certain men would not believe otherwise, by their own natures; and the supposition was even reasonable: the king might have his foreign bride and yet maintain a northern Guelen mistress to keep Murandys close to his side… if he were so inclined, or less in love with his bride.

Even to this hour Murandys was not utterly sure of his intentions, Cefwyn was sure, and he enjoyed every instant of it, modest recompense for the damage Murandys had done in his obdurate opposition to the marriage. That opposition had not stopped short of slander, which was why Lord Ryssand was home mourning a son this winter season; but since Murandys had gotten off alive and unscathed, and vengeance was yet unvisited, Murandys was learning that the king, like his grandfather, observed, remembered, and had very sudden limits to his tolerance.

“Shall I bring her?” Prichwarrin asked faintly, not loudly enough for the satisfaction of every listener leaning forward to hear, and Cefwyn cocked his head on a side, affecting not to hear, himself, so Prichwarrin said it again, clearing his throat. “She accepts Your Majesty’s gracious invitation.”

Oh, there still was a defiance. Indeed, and depend on it, the bitter bile could still from time to time seep out of Murandys… not a grand, battlefield sort of spirit, rather a mean dagger on the stairs sort of courage.

Luriel, his niece, had both kinds.

“Invitation?” Cefwyn echoed him, casting mild aspersion, loudly enough to be gossiped about, and gave Prichwarrin no chance to amend himself… fool, to challenge him here, and under the circumstances; but Prichwarrin had not proved himself the keenest wit in court, and the lack of Ryssand’s guidance tonight was evident. “Bring your niece in,” Cefwyn said, “yes, pray do. Let us see her.”

“Your Majesty,” Prichwarrin said, his face quite rigid, and turned and walked through a widening gauntlet of spectators toward the doors. A small whisper of anticipated misfortune followed him.

The doors opened, and the hall stayed fixed on the sight of Prichwarrin going out, and immediately on Prichwarrin coming back, not escorting his niece, rather stepping aside as if he had just admitted the plague.

Luriel had evidently waited cloaked, for a moderate gasp went up as she appeared: the lady came not in modest repentance, but in jewels and a russet gown that blazed in the soft candle glow of the hall. Her fair hair was swept up in braids and pinned with gold; her cloak was trimmed with fox and embroidered in gold thread.

Fox-colors to cover a vixen heart, Cefwyn thought, well remembering that wonderful hair tumbled on a pillow, and that silken body luxuriant by faintest candlelight… how could a man not recall those nights, even a man faithful and sworn? Luriel wore the russet gown like a bright blazon in a hall listening and watching for her destruction. She wore it before all the good Quinalt women who would die rather than yield the virtue she had freely abandoned in a Marhanen’s bed; and she wore it before all the good pious Quinalt men who now longed to breach that defense for themselves. She was a battle cry in motion as she walked to the steps of the dais, and there with a pale, set countenance, she bowed her head and sank in a deep reverence from which majesty alone could bid her rise forgiven or damned.

“Lady Luriel,” Cefwyn said, “rise. We delight to see you. Welcome, most happily.”

“My lord king,” she said, looking up and rising indeed with a high flush on her cheeks. He had not been king when last they had seen one another, when she had left Henas’amef in grand dudgeon and ridden home… all because he would not pass last winter in revels and spend the Amefin treasury on her gowns.

She had hated the provincials of Amefel, calling them heretics, hated their rusticity, and despised the generally dark-haired Amefin lords and their ladies, calling them peasant farmers no matter their ancient blood.

Luriel now looked up at an Elwynim woman, the Elwynim being closer kin to the Amefin than not, a dark-haired, gray-eyed woman who was her rival in beauty, who had every motive to detest her, and who sat where she had hoped to sit as a crowned queen.

And what bitter and foreboding thoughts might not pass through Luriel’s heart? Or seeking what redress had she written those letters asking him to bring her to court, when her uncle’s order held her immured in his hall, in disgrace for her adventure?

Of all the ploys her uncle had used to prevent the wedding of him with Ninévrisë, however, her uncle had not brought Luriel’s lost virtue into it, and with reason: Luriel hated her uncle Prichwarrin from childhood and would take any opportunity to set him at disadvantage. The question in everyone’s mind, however, was not Lord Murandys’ view of his niece: power lay in other hands at this moment. Cefwyn maintained a studiedly calm benevolence as his bride and his former lover first crossed glances.

“Lady,” Ninévrisë said, and gallant and wise as she was, even held out her hand, bidding Luriel come toward her. She rose from her lesser throne as Luriel mounted the steps like a prisoner to the scaffold. The whole great hall held its collective breath as Ninévrisë took Luriel’s hands to prevent her second, confused curtsy.

To a stunned murmur from the hall, Ninévrisë leaned down and kissed Luriel of Murandys on either pallid cheek.

No one might ever have gotten the better of Luriel, her weak father’s and feckless mother’s despair in all her life, certainly the thorn in her uncle’s flesh; but Luriel stood eye-to-eye with Ninévrisë, and found not a word to say, beyond a faint, “Your Grace,” as the court maintained its deathly hush.

“How lovely you are,” Ninévrisë said. “I shall look forward to seeing you among the ladies in my court. No, better still, I command it.”

“Your Grace,” Luriel said again, blushing, actually blushing in confusion and perhaps in dread of women’s vengeance. Thus released, russet skirts gathered, she ebbed down the steps, having been publicly welcomed at highest authority into the society of the consort’s court, women who must under other circumstances ostracize her for her breach of rules; a society which, perversely, would have welcomed her with discreet silence on her sins were she to become the king’s mistress, and under the king’s protection. But absent the king’s furtive approval, she could not enter that society without the consort’s express invitation or some man’s patronage. Her kinship to Murandys was not sufficient for a woman under such a cloud. She would have had to find a connection or a liaison, probably furtive, likely less than her station, so that she could breach that female society on someone else’s privilege.

And lo! instead, acceptance and respectability was handed her in her own right, without struggle, from her enemy’s very hand, and Luriel was confounded and indebted to the Royal Consort at one stroke. As she backed from the foot of the dais perhaps her hard little heart even beat in gratitude; Cefwyn dared entertain that hope… at least of a calculated, weighed, and measured gratitude mingled with fear, for Luriel was, in terms of her own safety, no fool.

Her advantage most certainly now lay down a different path than she must have envisioned when she had written him letters pleading for royal rescue, and she must see that, either in gratitude or in fear… unless her scheming had turned one more corner than he had yet discovered.

His invitation to court was not a summons back to his bed, above all else. From the time they were lovers he had known that her true and deepest passion was for the throne, and that only Luriel’s mirror ever saw love in those blue eyes. No, no one touched Luriel’s well-armored little heart, no suitor ever so much as dented it, and no one could be more aware of that quality than her former lover. It was perhaps tragic that she was incapable of wanting power in a useful and sensible way, for what power itself could do— move armies, build cities, leave a legacy to the ages… but alas! all that wit and cleverness bent toward the trappings of power, the jewels, the music, and the festivities. She was no wiser than her mother in that respect.

But as of this moment and by reason of Ninévrisë’s action possibilities of such luxury lay before Lady Luriel, an entire array of possibilities which had not existed before she was bidden join the consort’s ladies: respectability, acceptance, clothes and music, festivities, the attention of handsome men, all the things that were Luriel’s life… all the ambitions that made her so cursed boring once the sun rose.

The eyes of various gentlemen about the room, too, had kindled with interest, unmarried men and married alike, poor bedazzled fools. And Luriel when she retreated from the royal presence did so with all her powers of charm and wealth newly restored about her, a serpent having shed its old skin, leaving it now in the dust of her former disgrace. She glowed. Her uncle Prichwarrin now came seeking her hand, oh, yes, eager to assert he governed Lady Luriel, and ruled her fortunes. She had been damaged by her willful daring, and now was repaired and shining new. Lord Murandys had a marketable commodity again, granted he could bid his niece with any better success than before.

But almost before Lord Murandys could claim her hand, there was, yes, Rusyn, second son of Panys, offering his.

It was no accident. Panys had agreed, when offered royal blessing for a swift and successful courtship, and the lad was more forward than even Cefwyn had anticipated, eager, his royally commanded act of chivalry now become the public and swift appropriation of a prize many men envied.

And though Panys had never been overly friendly with the lands above Guelessar, young Rusyn immediately entered into polite converse with Prichwarrin and the lady, pressing his respects on the king’s former mistress with vigor and bright determination.

Marry her, was Cefwyn’s private word on the matter. Marry her, bed her, and keep her from further scandal and rest assured that great estates go with her. A married and well-disposed Luriel, he had assured Rusyn’s father, would enjoy high royal favor… and a son of Panys would be in the approved line of inheritance in Murandys’ much larger lands and honors.

“Well-done,” Cefwyn said to Ninévrisë under the general buzz of conversation, and the uncertain start of musicians who first thought and then doubted they had received a royal cue. He gave a second, indubitable, and added, “I love you.”

“And is this Panys’ younger son?” Ninévrisë asked.

“Yes. That he is. Rusyn is the name. A scholar and a fine horseman.”

Whatever could he have seen in Luriel? He swore he had been ten years younger last year, a fool defiantly posed in his own perverse folly: rebellion from his father.

Yet he had escaped marriage with Murandys’ niece. That was some credit to his wit.

He had unraveled Heryn Aswydd’s treachery.

He had lived to be king, against all odds, and to the barons’ great disappointment, who had hoped for gentle, biddable, devoutly Quinalt Efanor.

But one remarkable year had seen him bed Luriel of Murandys and Heryn Aswydd’s twin sisters… and fill his nights now with the woman he truly loved, whose name and image he could not put in the same thought with that unholy threesome.

The music brightened into a country dance, the son of the lord of Panys dancing a wild turn with Luriel amid the whirling ranks of the young and breathless.

Solitary and out of sorts, Murandys went off to scowl by his column.

Chapter 4

Servants set out supper, prepared plain glass goblets… not Lady Orien’s cups, to be sure, although her dragons supported the table and loomed insistently from the ceiling of the ducal apartment, brazen, silent listeners recalling to any who knew her the presence of a woman and a household less than friendly to Cefwyn Marhanen, or to Mauryl. Tristen had ordered new cups, new service, and replacement from unquestioned sources for any foodstuff that might be about the place, all this before he would consent to live in this apartment; and plain pottery would have served him very well. But Tassand had come up with sturdy pewter plates and the green glass and argued it was more fitting a duke’s private table.

The furnishings, however, had remained what they were, massive and costly and part of the ducal trappings that were, unfortunately so in Tristen’s opinion, the pride of Amefel. The furnishings, the drapes, green velvet, he longed to replace, to exchange Aswydd green and gold for the proper deep red of Amefel.

But as he had said to Crissand and Uwen, the essential matters of his rule here did not involve the color of the drapery. An army of workmen was already underfoot repairing the expensive scars of his accession, and the presence of a few dragons and green drapes seemed tolerable and harmless, oppressive as they might be to his spirit. Accordingly he resolutely pretended the dragons were his, determinedly found a certain beauty of line in the snarling strike of scaled bodies, and told himself that green, besides being the Aswydd color, was the color of forest and hills.

Now he prepared to receive a guest, dragons and all… had asked Cevulirn to come here, rather than to the great hall, on the excuse of Cevulirn’s exhaustion. But it was the privacy he courted, a chance to talk outside all hearing… while gossip flew through the town and in and out among the great houses. Everyone wanted to know what dire circumstance had stirred Ivanor out of Guelessar. The earls of Amefel (and by now everyone in Henas’amef) knew the same thing: that, alone of the southern barons, Cevulirn had stayed in Guelemara to promote southern interests; and now he was here, conferring with their new lord.

An urgent message from the king?

A breach between the king and the south?

Were the Elwynim about to pour across the river, taking advantage of what they might deem was still a valid agreement for influence in Amefel? For the town by now knew that the rebels in Elwynor had agreed to come across the river in Edwyll’s scheme. Were they across and was the duke of Ivanor come as a prelude to a winter war?

All these tales Uwen reported from his tour of the stable yard and kitchens on their return. Uwen was deft at sifting rumors out of the very air: more, he was a common man good at talking to common folk who heard them, and gaining the truth from them.

“Bid the soldiers not gossip,” Tristen had said to Uwen from the moment they had come home, but as well bid the pigeons not to fly and not to profane the Quinalt steps. The soldiers simply did not understand and simply could not refrain.

So he took for granted the soldiers would in an hour or so have spilled all they saw and half what they imagined (they would have some discretion) in the barracks and the kitchens to persons of great trustworthiness. From there it was an easy step to the taverns. And back again, by servants, to the noble ears… which would engender more questions.

But the earls would have to content themselves with what Crissand could tell them, at least until the morrow. He had Cevulirn to himself. Only Emuin had he asked to be there… itself a remarkable event. And a private word with Emuin Tristen earnestly wished for, too, on different but related business.

But as yet there was not a whisper of wizardly attention, not in the gray space nor at his apartment door. Auld Syes was the name he had sent hurtling into the gray space when he had reached the inside of the wards and nearness to Emuin; and after it he had sent all that Auld Syes had said to him, with hopes that that name in itself would rouse Emuin out.

To his profound disappointment, no. But for Cevulirn… yes. Emuin would come.

Now with a quiet stir at the door, Cevulirn arrived and disposed his small escort with the guards outside, the four who watched over his door by night. He came in, modestly dressed, escorted by the youngest servant.

“Ah,” Cevulirn said when he looked toward a set and ready table, and his weathered face relaxed in pleasure as, his cloak scarcely bestowed on one servant’s arm, Tassand set a cup of wine in his hand.

“Please sit, sir,” Tristen said, with a gesture toward the table and its four places, one reserved for Uwen and one for Emuin. “I thought supper might come welcome.”

“Very welcome, after days of hard biscuit and bad ale. And this,” said Cevulirn, lifting his wine cup, “is not bad ale.”

“I’m pleased,” Tristen said, as they took their places. He relied on Tassand for such choices, limiting his own instructions to the request for something simple and hot, after the freezing ride. “We needn’t wait. Uwen and Emuin may come, but then, they may not.” He settled at table, let the servants serve the meal, and his guest have at least a taste of supper before he began with what his friends called his questions. “Did His Majesty send any message, sir?”

“I’ve heard nothing worse than the situation I left,” Cevulirn said, and this, in privacy, Tristen took for the whole, if not reassuring truth. “Say that His Majesty sent me home to Toj Embrel, and Ryssand mourns a son, hence my wintering at home.”

“Brugan?”

“Fair fight. Ryssand, however, will not see it that way.” Cevulirn, a man of few words, found a few more of them. “Brugan and Lord Murandys came with a document for the king’s seal… Do you wish to hear this during supper, or after?”

“During, if you will. I shouldn’t enjoy a bite, wondering.”

“So, then,” Cevulirn said. “Brugan and the document. Brugan came into the Guelesfort with Murandys, bringing this document which would strip the monarchy of power.”

“Cefwyn wouldn’t sign such a thing.”

“Ah, but they had a charge to make, if he would refuse. This was before the wedding, and they said if he wouldn’t sign, they’d bring proof of Ninévrisë’s unfaithfulness.”

“Unfaithfulness? There’s no one more faithful to him.”

Cevulirn, soup spoon in hand, gave him a lengthy and sober look. “I think Your Grace means in the ordinary way of honorable behavior, in which the lady is unassailable. Their meaning was the traditional one, men with women, that manner of betrayal.”

“Ninévrisë?”

“Your Grace, neither you nor I would think so. But there are those ready to believe ill of her, as of you. It was never their intent to besmirch Her Grace’s reputation… no. It was the king’s signature they wanted, and he’d granted all else they came demanding. They were emboldened to have it written out, with all manner of seals, a guarantee of the Quinalt’s power… but instead of doing it himself, Ryssand, who has a wit, sent Murandys and his own son, Brugan, who, denied private audience with His Majesty, were fools enough to say it all before me, before Prince Efanor, and Idrys.”

Tristen was appalled, not least at the folly of it. But Murandys had surely counted on Cefwyn and Efanor restraining Idrys, who would assuredly do whatever served Cefwyn.

Cevulirn had not, evidently, been restrained.

“And Brugan is dead? Directly as a result?”

Cevulirn laid down the spoon and regarded him in great seriousness. “Let me spread it all out for you, Your Grace. The precise charge was that Ninévrisë had a lover. Brugan’s sister Artisane was ready to swear to it… that Her Grace had you for a lover, plainly put.”

“Lover, sir?” The word fell at first confused on his hearing and then Unfolded in its carnal nature. He was disturbed enough by the word. Then he understood the rest of it, and his heart might have stopped. At very least it skipped a beat. “No, sir.”

“I said that it was false,” Cevulirn continued, “and Brugan having said it was true, he died. Hence His Majesty suggested I ride out of Guelemara that night. I would not have assented, but I feared if Ryssand had my presence to inflame him, he might press His Majesty with the same charges in public, and then the good gods know I would have had to remove the most pernicious influence in the court. To His Majesty’s detriment, he would insist, though I have a different opinion. So I honored my oath and left, against my will, and I have no knowledge how that fell out or whether the charge ever came public… but I know the wedding took place, which argues that it didn’t. And of you and Her Grace, I assure you, no one who knows either of you could credit such a thing. Unfortunately, many do not know you or Her Grace.”

“Ninévrisë is my friend,” he said lamely and at disadvantage, he, who had never had more than a fleeting glimpse of the flesh of women… and that, in Lady Orien Aswydd, whose allure was a dark and dangerous one. He failed entirely to compass the thought, he was so astonished and appalled. “How can they have said so?”

“Artisane lied,” Cevulirn said simply, “to please her father.” Cevulirn tore off a piece of bread. “Now are you sorry not to have had supper first?”

“I think I should be ill. I should go to Guelemara!”

“By no means! The lie, such as it is, is at least silent enough that I believe the wedding took place. No more can we do. Your presence there would break it all open again, to what result none of us can predict. And listen: you will be amazed. Efanor was willing to draw, he was so outraged.”

Efanor. Prince Efanor, who had given him the little book of Quinalt devotions, which he had by his bed. Efanor the pious, who thought so much of the gods he would never act inconsiderately: Efanor would draw his sword and fight for Her Grace’s innocence. To such desperate violence the court had come, and so far had Efanor gone to side with his brother against Ryssand’s lie.

“I am astonished,” he said, finding the presence of mind to pick up his spoon.

“So His Majesty has married the Lady Regent, and I delayed at Clusyn until I had firmly and clearly received that report.”

“Then you went home to Ivanor… and came here.”

“Here I wished to come. But I’d been long absent from my own hall, and things there wanted at least a glance and a question. In these times, to ride the true road, straight west to you, was to invite comment… and a certain hazard, for a man feuding with Ryssand. I regard my men too highly to do that. Yes, I went home, advised my folk to prepare even against a raid from the north, or assassins. Then came I here, with no delay, hearing rumors of unrest in Amefel. I’m glad to find it settled.”

Cevulirn’s spies were nothing less than skilled, and in every court in the land, Tristen suspected, for little as the man said on most occasions, he always was well informed.

“The rebellion was against Lord Parsynan’s vice regency,” Tristen said directly. “Earl Edwyll had a promise from Tasmôrden to bring Elwynim forces across the river to support a rebellion; but Tasmôrden is still besieging Ilefínian. He only looked for Edwyll to make war here and keep Cefwyn’s attention away from him.”

“I’m hardly surprised in Tasmôrden’s actions. Only in Edwyll’s simplicity. I had thought him wiser.”

“He was desperate.”

“He died.”

“Of accident. In this very apartment, while his men awaited an answer on their surrender. He’d drunk Lady Orien’s wine… have no fear,” he said, at Cevulirn’s lifted brow. “We’ve changed the cups and drink from no other vessel she ever used. You heard this evening how Edwyll’s son Crissand surrendered the citadel to me on a promise of safety. But the lord viceroy killed the men who surrendered; and almost Crissand himself. So I sent Parsynan out of Amefel, and retained the Guelen and the Dragon Guard until I can find Amefin enough to make a guard.”

“Prichwarrin counseled Cefwyn to put him in office. He’s of that faction; I would wager any sum you like that he’s Corswyndam’s man.”

“I have proof of it,” Tristen said. “Ryssand had sent Parsynan a message warning him I was to have Amefel, and the messenger rode to reach here and deliver it before the king’s herald. Uwen and Anwyll and Emuin all say it’s against the law to do that.”

“Treason to do so, unquestioned.”

“More, the lord viceroy called in only one of the earls to warn him, Lord Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, and Cuthan also knew Edwyll was about to seize the citadel; but Cuthan was Edwyll’s rival. So when Parsynan warned Cuthan a change was coming Cuthan kept both sides’ secrets until after Edwyll had attacked the viceroy’s forces. Then he told the rest of the earls. That way all Edwyll’s support failed, and no matter whether the Elwynim crossed the river to support the rebels or whether Cefwyn’s troops took the town back, Cuthan would be safe. Some of the others held back to see whether the Elwynim would in fact come in, but I don’t mention that to them, and they know now it was a bad notion. The other earls never hesitated to join me. They pretend they didn’t know they were supposed to be rebels, and I pretend I don’t know either, and so they feel safer about it. Crissand, too: he stood by his father, waiting for a message to let him do differently, but it never came. At the last he surrendered to save his men. Now he’s sworn to me, and I’ve had no cause to doubt him.” That lengthy report drew a long, a solemn look. “You’ve grown very wise, Amefel. I am impressed.”

“I hope so, sir.”

Cevulirn knew him to a degree Amefel did not, and knew his failures and his follies. And Tristen felt his heart beat hard at Cevulirn’s gray, assessing stare.

“Protect yourself. You must protect yourself,” Cevulirn said. “And recall that Aswydd blood runs in both young Crissand and in Cuthan, just outside the degree that would have seen them banished in Cefwyn’s order.”

He knew. He certainly knew; and Auld Syes’ salutation rang in his memory. Lord of Amefel and the aetheling…

“Too,” Cevulirn said, “the ladies Aswydd are still alive, just across the border in Guelessar, learning sanctity in a nunnery… messengers might go between here and there with no trouble at all.”

The Aswydd dragons looming over them and about them seemed ominous, and the very air grew close, full of foreboding. “I never forget it.” He gave a glance, a lift of his hand at the dragons. “They remind me.”

“That they do,” Cevulirn said. “In this very room Orien practiced her sorcery, wizardry, gods-know-what.”

“There’s a difference, sir.”

“I am aware there is. She began in one and set one foot in the other, gods send she tries no worse where she is. But that’s why we have you and master Emuin. —I trust Emuin is in good health. I trust that’s not behind his absence tonight.”

“In good health, but locked in his tower. He will not see us after all, it seems.” Tristen forbade himself the peevishness he felt about it. Anger was not safe for him: Emuin had warned him so, then provoked him, more than anyone else close to him. “I posed him questions, several questions. I don’t doubt he’s deep in his books. Or he’s forgotten what hour it is. Whether he will answer my questions, I’ve no idea.”

“A difficult post you’ve been given.”

“Difficult in every point. One I haven’t told you, sir. I’ve banished Lord Cuthan.”

“Banished him! Where? To Guelessar? To Cefwyn?”

“To Elwynor, which he accepted; but we found the archivist was dead during the commotion, and someone had both dug out and stolen Mauryl’s records… we suspect the second archivist. But Cuthan may have been to blame for it… at least some of the documents turned up in Cuthan’s house. We searched his goods that he removed to take with him, but the guards might well have missed a scroll or two.”

“Mauryl’s records?”

“Letters to Amefel. I have the pieces of what they burned, but they say very little. Others may have said more.”

Cevulirn drew a long, deep breath. “Wizard-work. Cuthan banished. Edwyll dead. Wagons bound for the border. And now records of Mauryl’s time. Unnatural storms. And you just a fortnight in office, lord of Amefel. An active neighbor you will be to my lands, I do foresee it. Well that I lost no more time in coming here.”

“M’lord,” Tassand said, arriving in the room, and Tristen became aware there had been doings at the outer door. He had supposed it was another course of their supper being brought; but behind Tassand, Emuin came trailing in, late, with one of the servants still fussing his robe onto his shoulders, and with Uwen briskly behind him.

“Well, well,” Emuin said, “all manner of birds before the storm, and a gray gull from the south, this time. News from the capital? They are wed?”

“So far as I do know,” Cevulirn said. “I rode up from the south, having visited my hall briefly, and turned north to present a neighbor’s greetings before the snow fell. —And to see whether Lord Tristen had levered His Majesty’s viceroy out the gates, or whether he might need help.” Cevulirn could be urbane and quick when he wished. Cevulirn also liked and trusted Emuin, Tristen had no doubt of it, but this was a very brief account, passing over more than it said. “I’d not bargained for deep winter in the hills.”

Emuin’s face changed, very subtly.

“So Uwen said,” Emuin replied, and settled at table. So did Uwen, diffidently, though less abashed in small company, and the servants served the next course, while the talk drifted momentarily to the fare before them.

“Auld Syes met me on my way,” Tristen said, “and advised me a friend was southward. Then the storm began, which I’m sure Uwen told you. It stopped when I called Seddiwy’s name.”

—I told you what Auld Syes said, he challenged the old man in the gray space, quietly and close at hand, disturbing as little as possible. This business about kings and aethelings. And friends to the south.

—With this great storm about. When wizardry stirs up forces, some other wizard may nip in and use them. I mislike it. I tell you I do.

—The storm came out of the west, sir.

—So does the evening sun, young lord. Does the heavenly orb belong to Mauryl or any other?

—But who sent the storm, then, sir?

—I’m sure I don’t know. Was I there? Did you consult me? You did not.

The servants had brought in their meat and served it, and Tristen, frowning, cut a bit of cheese, out of appetite for dead creatures.

“There is opposition to us,” Emuin said in a muted voice, aloud. “I have difficulty determining whence it comes, whether collective, of many interests, or whether single, directing all. I cannot say, nor see a way to determine what we face.”

“In the storm?” Cevulirn asked, who had heard nothing of the lightning flash of exchange they had just had.

“It may be,” Emuin said.

—Shelter my birds, Auld Syes told me, master Emuin. Yet I saw no birds. My pigeons flew out and back in safety. They were about the ledge this evening.

Emuin’s face was very solemn. One trusts those birds, if any, would return.

“Cevulirn was caught in the storm,” Tristen said. “He’s killed Lord Ryssand’s son, and left Guelemara, and come here to see whether I needed his help.”

“Storms aplenty in this season, between wars,” Emuin said. “But they are wed and done with protests, is it so?”

“Charges of unfaithfulness, sir,” Cevulirn said, “naming Tristen, which no sane man credits.”

“Sanity is not requisite in Guelemara,” Emuin said. “Only orthodoxy. So Brugan is dead. Small loss.”

“I was about to say,” Tristen said, “which Lord Cevulirn doesn’t know, about the letter.”

“Mauryl’s letters?” Cevulirn asked.

“Ryssand’s to Lord Parsynan,” Tristen said. “Ryssand sent warning Parsynan I was coming. What I did not say… I sent the letter to Idrys, in hope it would reach Cefwyn more quickly that way.”

Cevulirn arched a brow, and a slow pleasure spread across his face. “Oh, His Majesty will be very pleased to have that in his hands. He has them. He has Ryssand in a noose, by the gods; and Ryssand will not find this easy.”

“I hoped it might be of some use to Cefwyn.”

“Of use to him! You’ve secured us all a quiet winter, and possibly saved Ylesuin. Oh, you’ll be far better a neighbor than Heryn Aswydd, sir.”

Considering Heryn Aswydd, and Duchess Orien, it was certainly no extravagant compliment, but Tristen felt warmed by that approval all the same. “I’m very glad to have you for a neighbor, sir. I counted on your help in the spring, but I’d no expectation you’d come here this winter.”

“His Majesty was very wise to send you south. As he sent me, I think, knowing I might find you, and lo, here we are with our heads together and apprising each other of the actions of our enemies. If there was inspiration aloft in the lightning that night that cast you from the capital, it had to be in that stroke. His Majesty knows how weak his support is in the north, that at any moment these Guelen reeds he leans on may break and pierce his hand if not his heart. He won’t grudge you the use of the carts, not in the least, though for the northern barons’ eyes he may look askance at it. His Majesty can’t say so, but I think he is amply warned and wary of just such treachery as you sent him proof of.”

“Yet he’ll not have me go cross the river,” Tristen said unhappily. “Tasmôrden is assailing Ilefínian at this very hour, or worse, and you and I and a troop of your light horse could prevent it; I said so before I left Guelemara. But Cefwyn expressly forbade it.”

Cevulirn’s eyes kindled and shadowed. The lord of the Ivanim was a man of grays, grays in his dress, grays of hair that reached to his shoulders, and frosty eyes that had perhaps the faint heritage of the old Sihhë lineage in them. Perhaps, in the terms Men reckoned such things, they were at least remote kin, he and Cevulirn. It was certain they were of like mind.

And in all this exchange, Emuin quietly ate and listened.

“His Majesty may be less inclined to walk softly past Ryssand now that he has that letter in his hand,” Cevulirn said. “Gods, that was a fine stroke. And were you not so explicitly enjoined against it, Amefel, I swear I would have my men here in short order, snow, storms, and all.”

“No,” Emuin said suddenly, and they all stopped and stared.

“No, sir?” Tristen asked.

Emuin seemed to have spoken on impulse, and now seemed to be as taken by surprise as they were.

“No,” Emuin said again more thoughtfully and more slowly. “It will not be. It must not happen. I cannot see it, and I distrust any such notion for the two of you alone.”

Tristen knew himself for the creature of less than a year, less adroit than Men, and ignorant. But Emuin had not only bewildered Cevulirn, he had even astonished himself, to judge by the puzzled crease of Emuin’s brow.

“Is Cefwyn in danger from such an action?” To that sort of subtlety he had ascended, out of his former ignorance. “Would it set wizardous matters amiss?”

“Matters amiss with the northern barons, without a doubt,” Emuin said in a distant tone. “But no, their discomfort is nowhere a concern in what I feel. Something will come, perhaps out of the north, I have no knowledge, nor can say what, but come it will, and we cannot be caught napping, or venture too recklessly across the river.”

“Assassins?” Such had been known, or claimed, in Amefel, in Cefwyn’s tenure. So Heryn Aswydd had claimed… falsely.

Emuin shook his head. “I don’t know. Nor even from which side of the river it might come.”

“I put nothing past these northern barons,” Cevulirn said, himself a southerner. “They’d slip a dagger in our good king’s back and have a new dynasty… if Ryssand dared, if Ryssand didn’t know there’d be war, war within, and war pouring over Ylesuin’s border. This letter you gave into Idrys’ hands will set the fear in Ryssand, and it may have quieted him for a space. Treachery from the Elwynim? Easily aimed at Cefwyn. Or at Her Grace. No need even to warn His Majesty of that danger. He knows with whom he has to deal. And as for the rest of the barons… those who once thought Efanor would be a more tractable king… I think Prince Efanor would be far other than they once thought him, if ever he came to the throne. There’s an anger in Efanor that never yet has come out, and I think if no other has, Ryssand may have begun to perceive it, that day Brugan died. If anything should befall Cefwyn, Ryssand would not benefit by it.”

Hard words, very hard words, even to contemplate Cefwyn fallen. Tristen’s heart beat faster, and he saw extremities of anger in himself he had never contemplated, a door he very quickly shut fast and barred, holding to the calm Cevulirn spread abroad.

“Cefwyn is my law, sir. If they harmed him, or Her Grace, they would find me at their door. I’m not Guelen. Nor Ryssandish. And I don’t care for the things they care for.”

A small silence followed, Cevulirn’s stark stare, and Emuin’s, alike directed at him, as if they knew that door existed.

“I believe that,” Cevulirn said. “Nor am I Guelen, or Ryssandish, for that matter. But make no such threats openly.”

“Shall I allow them to plot against him and do him harm?” He found it all but impossible to sit calmly in his chair, a province removed from Cefwyn. “I won’t.”

“You would rouse Guelessar in arms against Amefel and Amefel against Ryssand and have all the realm in civil war,” Emuin said, “if you bruited such a threat about. No, indeed you are not Guelen, young lord, nor Ryssandish, and by the evidence of witnesses, including Uwen Lewen’s-son, I’ve no doubt you’d strew dead in windrows if they provoked your anger, but that’s not what His Majesty needs of you at this pass. No. Contain your temper and your imagination. I pray you, contain it. There’s no need for it yet. Only for cleverness and clear thought, which are in lamentable short supply in the north.”

“Do you know what we ought to do? Tell me what Cefwyn does need, master Emuin, and I’ll gladly do it.”

“So will we both,” said Cevulirn.

The servants were near, but they were his own, Tassand foremost of them, all brought with him from Amefel to Guelessar and back again. They were men loyal to him. Uwen, who had come late, had his meal in silence, and stayed silent throughout, but now Uwen’s keen glance went to one of them and the other, a wise, common man who doubtless was thinking his own thoughts, and who looked grim and afraid, beyond easy reassurance.

“Yet you left Guelemara not of your own will,” Emuin said, “lord of Ivanor. As did Lord Tristen. I’d say you had well-thought reason to obey His Majesty in that regard.”

“If I could have steadied His Majesty’s power by staying,” Cevulirn said, “I would have done it; but nothing’s served if we weaken the kingdom in fighting among ourselves. If Ylesuin stays strong and if Her Grace comes to Elwynor soon, the common folk across the river will rally to her banner despite her marrying a Marhanen king. If she fails to come to their relief at first opportunity, the hope becomes less and less she will ever come. In that case, support for her cause will fall away to Tasmôrden quick as the wind can turn. So if we here begin any dissent that delays Her Grace returning to Elwynor and keeping her pledge to her people, then anything we do does the king harm, not good.”

It was very clear what Emuin had wished Cevulirn to argue to him: his reasons, clearly given, to retreat and not contest his dismissal. And he heard them as good reasons.

“Yet,” Tristen said with a sidelong, defiant glance at Emuin, “if we could prevent Tasmôrden altogether… and bring him down…”

“Even so,” Emuin said, “gods know where that would lead. To a rising in the north, very possibly. Very likely the barons’ failure to answer the king’s call to arms. He might call and they might bid the king enforce his orders how he might. No, young lord, listen to Cevulirn in this. We dare not defy the king, we the loyal subjects. If we don’t obey him, who will? And if you ride across the river and take Ilefínian, what in the gods’ good name will you do with it?”

“Yet,” Cevulirn said before Tristen could answer, “I have sent riders to Lanfarnesse and Olmern, and even to my neighbor Umanon in Imor.”

Emuin was less pleased with that news.

“Also,” Cevulirn went on, “I’ve left my second-in-command clear instruction to take the dukedom and swear to Cefwyn in the field should aught befall me untimely on the road: I’ll not risk my successor by sending him to Guelemara as things sit now. In good truth, I expect Ryssand to attempt my life before the year’s out, and I advise my allies as well as my appointed successor to look to their own backs. To you I came personally, as you see. To Idrys I have already spoken, and you know his opinion of Ryssand. To the risk of his own life, Idrys would proceed against Ryssand and Murandys; but not if Ryssand moderates his threats, and I understand that reasoning. It’s Ryssand’s compliance the king needs. Ryssand’s gone as far as the king will permit, and Ryssand knows his head doesn’t sit securely. Let him worry of nights whether Idrys will act in absence of orders. It will keep him out of mischief.”

“To the kingdom’s peril if Idrys should take it on himself to act,” Emuin said darkly. “There’s no succession in Ryssand now, once Corswyndam’s gone.”

“Tasmôrden has already attempted to divide Amefel from the rest of the kingdom,” Tristen said. “And he may well seek some means to unsettle us. Wouldn’t he rather see Ylesuin fighting inside its own borders instead of crossing the river in the spring?” All the uncertainty of the day brimmed up in him like flood. “And wizardry, if it does work on Tasmôrden’s side, would press for that. Wouldn’t it strike at the stone that will move, if it wants to bring the wall down?”

Cevulirn cast him a stark, a calculating look.

“Oh,” said Emuin, “you would be astonished what understandings come to our young lord in dreams these days.”

“I’ve understood nothing in dreams,” Tristen said, disturbed even to think of them. “I dream of dragons, sir. And Owl.”

“You don’t dream as men dream, no,” Emuin said, “yet all the same you do find curious notions, young lord, and keep me in continual suspense what understandings you may come by. You ask advice. In this I’ll give it. Don’t encourage Ryssand to greater adventures. That’s considerable advice, young lord. Kings could profit by it. I pray ours does.”

“That’s what I must not do,” he said. “But what shall we do, sir?”

“Why, you both shall do wisely, I hope, as each event demands.”

“Wisely.”

“But tell you what to do or what to purpose, that I will not, young lord, storm as you will. You say I don’t listen to you; I assure you to the contrary. I have been listening.”

“I do not storm, sir!”

Emuin held up a palm to heaven. “I think I felt a raindrop.”

“I assure you, sir, I am not demanding.”

“Ah,” said Emuin, and reached for his cup, from which he took a slow sip of wine in a deep silence at the table. “Then let me be less humorous, at your pleasure. Cefwyn will ride among the first troops across the river. Not prophecy: he’s Marhanen, and that sort of folly is his notion of kingship. If all else went well and if Cefwyn fell, it would very likely prevent any crossing at all, and it would make Ninévrisë a widow without a king to enforce her rights. There is your danger. Against all prudence, Cefwyn will afford Tasmôrden that chance at his life… if he ever comes to the river. Yes, Tasmôrden’s made one try here in the south, not a great one, with no expenditure of men. But I do agree: it shows the inclination of the man to proceed by indirection and tricks. He’s more subtle than his predecessor, Aseyneddin. He doesn’t go straight to his objective, but in a slow and curving path. In many regards, he’s more dangerous than Aseyneddin.”

“The south will not rebel, thanks to His Grace,” Cevulirn said. “That’s failed, let us hope, and now our enemy has to take Ilefínian and subdue it before he can turn his attention to other objectives. But he has shown the ability to pursue two courses at once.”

Cevulirn said that, and said something more, but the candlelight had gone to brass and the sound had dimmed. Tristen sat still, saw Emuin looking at him, and yet was not in that gray space. It was as if the ordinary world had slid from under him. He felt his senses slipping from him, and fought to have them back again… he was not the youth who had slipped away in sleep when too great things had Unfolded and startled his senses, but it was like that. He clenched his hand on the arm of the chair and drew a deep breath as darkness closed in.

He saw a dim cell that he had known, himself, first of all places in the fortress of Henas’amef, save the gatehouse. He did not know what the gatehouse of the stable-court and the west stairs should have to do with Tasmôrden and sieges and intentions, but it did.

And he saw the lower hallway, that in front of the great hall, with light of day broken in where no light should be in the middle of the night, a dusty great light coming from a boarded end.

He heard a sound like the sound of his own heart beating in his ears, as if he had been climbing a high, high stairs, into dark, and. into the gray space, where someone waited for him.

He would not go.

There was that Place.

And there was the cell beneath the west stairs. It was a different thing. It was related, but only discernible because the lower hall had disturbed him. Things tottered, chances poised that might go amiss tonight, and he felt flaws in his own safety. He had a lump on his head and had just waked, in fear, and in pain.

“M’lord?”

Uwen’s voice, Uwen, whom he had given the gift to Call him, Uwen, whose hand seized with gentle strength on his shoulder, so that he became aware first of Emuin’s presence, bright and glowing, and Cevulirn’s, dimmer, and Uwen’s, common as stone, and as inert, and as solid. Of them all, Uwen was plain, unequivocal earth, strong and constant.

“It’s one of his takin’s,” Uwen said. “He ain’t had one o’ these in a while. M’lord, do ye hear me?”

He did, perfectly well, but he could only press Uwen’s hand for the moment. Then he found a breath. “I’m going to the west stairs cell.”

“The west stairs cell?” Emuin asked sharply.

Uwen’s face, close to his, showed deep concern, but no refusal. “Aye, m’lord, if ye will, and shall we do something in particular while we’re there?”

“I think so,” he said, and knew that Uwen would keep the rest of them from thinking him mad, but he had acquired something he had been looking for, and he refused to let go. He was acutely aware of Emuin weaving a tight net about them all, a safety within this dreadful room; and aware of Cevulirn, whose attention was wary and sure as a sword blade… no wizard, but no easy venture for a wizard, either, edged with a gift he had never himself brought forth into use.

“I’ve seen a shadow of sorts before this,” he said to Cevulirn and to the two he trusted readily with such information. He tried to look at them as he spoke, and yet could not look away from the brazen dragon that loomed across the entry to the next room; it drew his attention, and his heart beat in his fingertips. He could scarcely muster his voice, and had half lost command of his limbs. The dragon meant something. It had something of its own to tell him, one more clamor for his attention.

“M’lord,” said Uwen, and almost pried him from that wide awareness, but not quite. It was not that he was bound: it was that it was important, that matter in the cell, inside the wards that defended them.

“We should, perhaps, go,” said Cevulirn, “and let His Grace rest. We were the second encounter of the day, so I understand.”

“No!” Tristen said, then realized that utterance had been too fierce. He moderated it, with the vision of the dragon in his eyes: “No. Hear this. Hear it and remember it for me, for I shall forget once this is past. It’s not the same as the Shadow at Lewenbrook, but all the same it troubles me. I see it to the east, at times… mostly east, sometimes to the west, like the storm today. Emuin says if it’s a storm, it must come from the west, because storms do, and that’s only sensible: I believe him. But I’m not sure that’s the only reason or that it’s always the same shadow. Shadows exist within the wards, in the hall below, too… I saw them in the first days I came to Henas’amef. Emuin knows what I mean. Emuin has seen them. There’s something there. And there’s another thing in the cell beneath the stairs, by the stable-court.”

“The guardroom.”

“The cell. We should go there.”

“Of course,” Emuin said with a fey desperation. “Of course we must, and gods save us all, young lord, what are we looking for?”

“A thief,” he said, not knowing why he thought so, for it did not regard Mauryl’s letters, and that search. He was sure of that. He rose from an unfinished supper, still gazing at the dragon, but able to look away now, from moment to moment, aware that he had in Lord Cevulirn a man who had been many days on the road and who could well do with that supper that to him had turned cold and unimportant. “I beg you stay, sir, enjoy your meal. This regards a very small thing I must attend, no present danger, nothing that will keep me long, I think. I’ll come back when I’m done, and we’ll share a cup before bed.”

Social graces, social words, such as he had heard others make. But he had told the truth. He knew, at least, that the summons was brief, and that someone essential, someone looked-for, waited for him in that cell.

Chapter 5

Yes, m’lord,” was the word from the Amefin guard… Ness, the man’s name was. Ness had followed them unbidden from his post, his comrade left to stand guard above. “M’lord, Selmwy and I found ’im, only on account o’ the Guelenmen we lost ’im… so’s by Your Grace’s order I got the keys back.”

What Ness said made no particular sense to Tristen, and echoed off the walls of the small area outside the few cells the same way Ness’s voice had echoed to him a certain night this early summer, that night when he himself, a prisoner, had sat in the endmost cell battered and bruised and sadly bewildered.

Then he had been afraid of Ness, and of this place. Now the tables were altogether turned, and Ness, fearing him, protested something done or not done by the Guelen Guard, and hoped his lord would forgive the confusion.

Forgiveness was easy. Forgiveness meant simply putting from his thoughts all anger toward Ness, who had never been a bad man, only a hasty one, and who had thought on that day last summer he was protecting the prince from thieves and assassins. Now Ness had brought down the keys, which he had fought over with the Guelens in the hall above, and in trembling haste opened the door to show him the object of contention between the two guard companies.

Uwen, practical man, had brought the lantern down from upstairs, a shielded light reliable in the gusts that swept these stairs. Meanwhile, still indignant, robbed of keys and charge, a Guelen guard had followed Uwen down the steps to watch the proceedings.

It was a jealous battle of authorities, and within it all, Lusin and Syllan had posted themselves upstairs, household officers, deliberately standing between the Guelen Guard, king’s men, and the Amefin gate-guard, duke’s men, who had claimed the royal prisoner and written him down as theirs. Emuin had stayed above with the opposed guardsmen, too, declaring it too much of a crowd on the narrow stairs.

In fact the squabble of guards and authorities like pigeons over a morsel of bread, and all of them so earnest, began to be a comedy… or would have been so, except for the wizard-feeling trembling in the air, and the fact that, jests and foolishness aside, the young man in this cell was in peril of his life.

The door opened into dark and showed them the morsel in question… a small lump of knees and elbows in the light of the lantern Uwen held high. The lump moved… a boy who hid his face and squinted at the light, then, vision obtained between knee and elbows, let out a startlingly pitiful sound and attempted to be completely invisible. Terror lanced through the gray space, and Tristen drew in a sharp breath and forbade the boy that invisibility, on all levels.

“Be still!” he said, and now he knew why he had bidden his guard gather this boy along with all the missing staff. Wizard-gift was in him.

“M’lord!” the waif cried and flung himself on his face in the dirty straw, and there all things stopped, in the gray space and in this place that stank with a remembered stench, and that held all the terror he himself had felt here.

“Paisi,” Tristen said more gently. “Paisi is your name.”

“No, no, m’lord, ’at’s somebody else.”

“Look up. Look at me.”

Emuin should have come down, Tristen thought now, because the wizard-feeling rattled off the walls. But then, Emuin hardly needed to, for he was there, having an ear to the gray place, reserving himself from the gusts of fear and alarm that blew wildly about the cell.

In Amefin blood, the Guelenfolk said, was no little amount of the Sihhë. And he would not be surprised, in better light, and if the lad would look up at all at the lantern, if Paisi’s eyes were gray as old glass.

“Paisi,” he said again. “Never hide from me.” Had not Mauryl said something of the sort to him, once?

And indeed the boy did venture half a look, furtive and fearful.

“See, you’re not harmed. You’re not to be harmed.”

Terror still flooded forth, and defense, angry defense, but not denial.

“Boy,” Uwen said, at his shoulder, a slow and tolerant voice, “your new lord’s been huntin’ ye high and low for a fortnight, an’ set some great store by findin’ ye, so’s ye might as well bring your head up an’ face ’im as near like a good, respectable lad as ye can manage. Get up, an’ make a proper respect to His Grace. Ye’re half a man… be all o’ one.”

The youth, stung, did get to his feet, but kept his back against his corner, as if the wall was safety, or needful support.

“What’s the charge again’ ’im, exactly?” Uwen asked with a glance over his shoulder at Ness. They had heard a confused account of theft, above, but Uwen asked particulars.

“Pilferage from m’lord’s wagons,” Ness said.

“A thief,” Tristen said, recalling his impression above.

“A hungry boy, m’lord,” Ness said, bravely. “Bein’ afraid to come to the gate where he usually got a bit o’ bread an’ a meal or two off the kitchen leavin’s, an’ carry messages for the guard. We ain’t seen ’im since the order went out to find ’im.”

“And he guides strangers, do you, Paisi?”

“M’lord,” was all the boy was willing to say, and the fear in the gray space was overwhelming.

“They been chasin’ ’im all the day. An’ was in the way o’ hangin’ ’im,” Ness said. “For theft o’ personal goods.”

“They will not hang him,” Tristen said. He had seen men hang, and had no desire to see this boy meet such a fate. “Not this boy, and no one else, will they hang. If there are thieves or hungry folk, send them to me.”

“M’lord,” Ness said faintly and fearfully, acknowledging the order.

Paisi, too, stared at him with the same wide-eyed look the young villagers in Guelessar had had, burning curiosity and stark fear commingled. It was a summer and a fall since they had looked at one another, and Tristen was not sure he would have recognized Paisi by the look alone… a boy, of what years Tristen had no idea how to reckon by looking at him. But this was indeed the boy who had found him wandering in the streets of the town and guided him to Cefwyn, and now he knew it was no happenstance that had drawn Paisi to him, though neither of them had known it then. Ness had been there. And surely Ness remembered.

“How old might you be?” he asked Paisi: nearly, but not quite a man, was the reckoning his eye made, and Paisi himself only shrugged as if that, like other things, escaped him.

“Little as fourteen, much as sixteen winters,” Uwen said in the subject’s silence. “An’ he don’t have proper manners for ye to bring ’im into a fine house, m’lord. ’E might do well in the guard if he learnt to stand an’ look at a man.”

What should he do with the boy now he had found him? He had never yet reckoned that part of his search. It had only mattered to him to know where Paisi was, and to know that he was close to him and could not fall into the hands of anyone else. He had added Paisi to his list of those souls he wanted found, and found for the same reasons as he would secure wards and latch windows, gathering the power of the household close in one place, not scattering it abroad, available to any ill intention that wandered in from Elwynor.

But he had never, when he had first met Paisi, been aware of the gift in him. He had been very marginally aware of the gift in himself, on that confused evening. But he had no doubt at all now why Paisi of all boys in Henas’amef had happened across him, and guided him to Cefwyn’s gate. No chance, but wizardry had brought him to Cefwyn. He had wondered was there somewhere else he was supposed to have gone, perhaps to Elwynor or to the Lord Regent… but meeting Paisi now, he knew it was no chance, and that Cefwyn’s court was where Mauryl had intended him to go.

That was a profound realization, one that led him astray to Ynefel and back, so that he needed Uwen’s touch on the arm to remember what was essential, to find the boy someplace other than a straw-lined cell.

He did not want the boy loose and unwatched, no more than Mauryl’s letters or Mauryl’s books or a staff that Mauryl had leaned on. The wizardry that had sent him into the world had brushed past this boy and made of the boy a pivot-point on which so much else turned.

“He might help Tassand with Emuin’s tower, if he were of a mind. I think I would prefer him in the house and not out of it.”

“He’ll steal the silver, m’lord. He wouldn’t want to, but I fear temptation’d be too much for the lad. He can’t rightly reckon his prospects. What ye hold up to ’im is so far beyond his ken as the sun and the stars is, and he just don’t know how to think of silver an’ hungry folk an’ what he wants all at the same time.”

“Nor do I,” Tristen said, bringing silence all around him. “Yet I try.” It was firmer and firmer in his mind that with all else unhinged in the world, any piece of his own left unclaimed could become an adit for sorcery, a danger as great as a broken ward. He had not been prepared to find Paisi so urgently claiming his attention. He had certainly not been prepared to find him in trouble with the king’s guard and arrested for theft. But he was not utterly surprised, either. Uwen was right. Paisi was not a boy easy to love.

In fact he wondered if anyone but Ness had ever cared for him. And he wondered for what reason outside the common goodness of Ness’s heart anyone had seen him fed and clothed. He had had Mauryl when he was foolish and helpless. But who had cared for Paisi’s needs? And why?

“Is he yours?” he asked Ness. “Is he kin of yours?”

“M’lord,” Ness said faintly, unsure, it was likely, what claiming Paisi might entail, or wherein he might be deemed at fault. “No, he ain’t kin. He ain’t no one’s kin, that I know. But we an’ the lads at the gate, we took care of ’im, an’ he kind of slipped about the streets an’ told us if there was somethin‘ amiss.”

“Then he has had a use.”

“Aye, m’lord, sort of a use. An’ ’e ain’t stole except once. Or twice.”

“Has he lied to you?”

“Not so’s ever mattered. ’E tells tales. ’E’s a boy. Boys do.”

“Then take him at least for the night. —Go to Ness,” Tristen said to the young prisoner, “and do as he bids you. Have a bath at the scullery, have something to eat, and I’ll send someone for you in the morning who’ll tell you what you have to do. You’ve protected the town before. You’ll go on protecting it. And you’ll be an honest boy and not steal anything again, or Emuin will turn you into a toad.”

Paisi cast frantic glances at Ness and at him, and at Uwen. Whether or not he believed the threat of being a toad he surely knew by now he was deep in wizards’ business, and in danger.

“I have enemies,” Tristen said softly, “and only honesty and my service may protect you. Dishonesty will deliver you to my enemies as surely as if you walked to Tasmôrden’s gates.”

“I don’t know about lords an’ wizards!” Paisi protested, for the first time finding a string of words. “I don’t know about bein’ in the Zeide!”

“Learn,” Tristen said, “and make as few mistakes as you can. Steal nothing.” He gave a nod to Ness. “Find him a bed. And supper. I left mine, for this, and left my guest, too. I must go back upstairs.” He had only just realized the extent of his dereliction: strongly as he had felt the need here, he knew now he must go back and beg Cevulirn’s pardon. “I’ll send Tassand in the morning.”

“Scrub under them fingernails,” Uwen said, “as don’t seem likely ’e ever has. Show ’im how to stand like a soldier and speak up like one, too. It ain’t so different for His Grace’s servants.”

“Aye, Captain,” Ness said in a hushed tone.

And that was the end of the matter, with Ness and Paisi at last. Increasingly it seemed he had done the right, the necessary thing.

“M’lor’,” the young voice pursued him, a-tremble.

He stopped and looked back. Paisi had reached the bottom step, and came another step up.

“M’lor’, if it’s anything ye wish to hear… there’s talk, there’s talk I heard.”

“And what talk?”

The silence after said perhaps the boy was too eager, foolishly eager, to prove himself useful; and all he had was dubious. Ness seemed to think so, too, for he overtook the boy and set a cautioning hand on his shoulder.

“In the market they said… They said you was goin’ to raise up the old tower.”

“Ynefel?”

“That ’un, yes, m’lor’. —An’ ye’d bring back the magic.”

“Who says so?”

“The gran’mothers say’t.”

“He means the hedge-wizards,” Uwen said. “Mostly they’re midwives. Herb-witches.”

He hardly knew what to say to that charge. Likely it was already true, in the sense that he came from Ynefel. But it was nothing he wanted bruited about the streets: the Quinalt was not that well-disposed to him, and Idrys had warned him of it.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and I know nothing about these grandmothers. What else do you know?”

“There’s them carts gone out,” Paisi said, “an’ folk is talkin’ about war and maybe ye’ll call the muster.”

“I don’t intend to have war here. It’s far from my intention.”

“That’s what I know, m’lor’.”

The words were more than the words. The very stones rang with them… a sense of things to which ordinary men were deaf.

Of a sudden he reached across the gray space and seized on Paisi’s notice, startling his soul half out of him, and facing him there, in the gray…

—I think you hear me, Paisi.

“Gods bless!” Paisi cried, and in the one world fell to his knees and in this one whirled away on the winds of panic…

flat into Ness’s arms.

Tristen pursued, a mere step down the stairs, and had him at close attention.

—M’lor’…

“Don’t lie,”

he said, in this world and the gray one. “If you’ll do a service for me, ask the grandmothers what they would say to me.”

He had Emuin’s attention, and knew it; and Emuin was utterly aware of the waif, and of him. In that moment Paisi seemed to see Emuin, for he turned his head all in a jerk and fled.

In the world of Men Paisi missed the step and tumbled to his knees on it.

“M’ lord,” Paisi said, trembling.

“Go with Ness,” Tristen said aloud, and added, “Boy?” It echoed to him with Mauryl’s voice, kind and commanding at once. When had the tables turned? “I’ll never hurt you.”

“My lord,” Paisi whispered, on his knees.

“Send to Tassand in the morning,” Tristen said to Ness, “and let him have the run of the town as he has had. I’ve given him something to do for me.”

With that he had done all that was profitable to do, and he turned and went up the stairs with Uwen.

Emuin was there, with a handful of the Guelens, Emuin with hands in the sleeves of his gray robes, beneath the fitful light of a lantern, shielded light there in the drafty stairs. And even so the wind gusted the little flame and cast Emuin’s face in ominous shadow.

“A thief, you say,” Emuin prompted him aloud.

—And what more? Emuin confronted him in the gray space as well, and the gray clouds were roiled with the storm of Emuin’s distress.

—A boy, Tristen answered. He guided me to Cefwyn: should I leave him loose and unwarded? He’s an open threshold. Now he’s ours.

—Yours. Yours, young lord. I have nothing to do with him!

Paisi had led Tristen straight as an arrow from the town gates to Cefwyn’s doorstep, the night he had arrived. Wizardry went for weak points, and Paisi’s hunger was that; it went for movable points, and there was none more unstable than a boy with no bed at night; it went for persons with a glimmer of the gift and no knowledge how to use it. And if there was malice afoot in the gray space at large, seeking any approach, any weakness in his Place in the world, he had just mortared in that stone with strong wards. He had meant what he said to Paisi: if hostile force attempted this boy who had so basic and early a connection to his presence here, he would know that threshold had been crossed. But the boy was himself harmless as the old women Uwen named.

—Harmless! Emuin echoed his thought. Harmless now. Bring back the magic indeed.

—Is there truth in it, sir? Can you see? I can’t. Who are these grandmothers?

—The truth, gods, the truth! The cursed truth is the magic’s worn thin and raising it is work, young lord, wearying work, until a draught of your presence pours down, and a wizard who ought to know better finds it headier and headier wine, gods save me. Gods save us all.

The Guelen Guard, who had lost their prisoner to higher orders, stood frowning, meanwhile, and all the distressing exchange was in an eyeblink, leaving him staring at Emuin and Emuin conspicuously evading his eyes.

“The boy is a thief,” the Guelen officer said, “and will steal from Your Grace, if he goes free.”

“He will go free… in my service.” Tristen had no idea what the boy had stolen or whether they had gotten it back. The wagons bound for the border had been laden with all manner of things, supplies, soldiers’ belongings, tents and fittings as well as grain for horses. Paisi, however, would not have made off with a grain sack. Likely it was something smaller. “Whatever he stole,” Tristen said, “have the owner come to Uwen, and I will pay it.”

“Your Grace,” the sergeant said, “it was a man’s kit, an’ we ain’t ever found it.”

“Then Paisi will tell where he hid it.” He saw no profit in long debate with the officer, and pursued his way doggedly toward the lower west hall, having learned to disentangle himself from the importunate: solve a matter and move on, disentangling his guard and those with him at the same time, and leaving firm orders behind him.

But even so he felt himself constrained and hemmed about.

“What in the gods’ good name possessed you to ride out today?” Emuin asked. Not: why have we left a supper upstairs? That he took in stride. But riding out with Crissand… that was in question.

“Crissand asked,” he said simply. “Have you marked it, sir, he has the gift?”

“As does that boy. This is Amefel. Half the province has the gift in some measure!”

“Not to that measure.”

“No. That’s true.”

“I’ve done what I see to do. I ask, sir, this time I ask very strongly, that you advise me.”

“And still, I say I will not—”

“I know what you will not, sir! But consider… the harm is out across the river. It is across the river, is it not?”

“It seems to be.”

“Yet it was a great storm out there!” He needed exercise no discretion in front of Lusin and Uwen, who had been there, but he kept his voice low with great effort, lest it echo to the guards elsewhere, who surely could hear that they argued, if not what they argued. “Crissand urged me go, Auld Syes met me, Cevulirn had been on his way long before I took the notion to ride out. I say I felt disturbance in the west and you say not in the west. So where shall I look for it, sir? And what shall I do about it when I do find it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Nor do I care to, young lord. I’ve told you that.”

“And yet came with me back to Amefel.”

“Someone needed to.”

“And having arrived here, you do nothing, all for fear of involving yourself in Mauryl’s spells. And what if Mauryl wished you to advise me?”

“I know he did, young lord! That’s the bloody point! He had the cursed gall to leave you and me equally ignorant of his purposes and you ignorant of your purposes, and wherein am I to substitute mine? If mine were adequate, why am I not ruling Ynefel at this hour? No, no, and no! I am not Mauryl’s successor, and I am most certainly not your master! Rail on him, that he failed to advise you! But on we? Why, I do as he did! I leave you ignorant as a new-whelped pup and trust the unwinding of his spell to inform you of your reasons or his intent… so where am I at fault more than he, pray?”

Now they were well beyond what the guards should witness, even Lusin and Syllan, and some consciousness of witnesses and the echoing halls seemed to return to Emuin, and he moderated his voice. “Forgive me. But think on statecraft and moderate behavior, young lord. I’ve every suspicion the knowledge of that art is in you, and does Unfold at need. You are the lord of Amefel. Conduct yourself so! Hold audience for your people and don’t complain of me that I fail to advise you, when you will not act on the simple advice I have given you! And what do I tell you? Establish a court! Settle in one place and let entreaty come to you, not the other way about, none of this haring about the countryside looking for trouble! We are not yet at that need, that we must find troubles out by some country shrine.”

“I mentioned no shrine.”‘

There was a moment of silence then, and Emuin did not meet his eyes.

“You knew. You expected her,” Tristen said accusingly, “and never told me.”.

“Say I’m not surprised at her,” Emuin confessed, “since she precedes trouble, and trouble we shall have by spring, young lord, so she might as well have the winter’s start on it. I say act on the advice I do give and then we will proceed to the advice you complain I do not give.”

“And establish this court, sir?”

“That, for a beginning.”

“And spend my days settling the design for carved doors, and debating with craftsmen? Hard enough to see to the things I need to.”

“Better that than raising storms in the countryside. Stay out of mischief! Provoke nothing before its time.”

“Provoke what, sir? And in what time?” It was the very question he pursued, whether Emuin knew there was something on the horizon, or whether he was equally baffled and casting about for hints of what opposed them. “Storms may always come from the west, but Ynefel lies that way, too, and whether the tower is vacant or not concerns me. I have felt it vacant. I’ve thought that it was. Do you know?”

“Yes, it is vacant! I am certain of its vacancy, as I am certain there is no active shrine at Levey, and no hallow nor shadow beneath the oak that fell, not tonight, whatever may have been true at dawn this morning. But I’ll be most grateful, young lord, if you and yours could refrain from poking and prying under every stone in the province. Follow the advice I do give, and don’t rush into other things and then run to me for advice, as if I should have foreseen everything! I don’t. I can’t. I won’t. So there! I’m out of need for supper this evening, and far from polite converse. Entertain your guest. I’ll go back to my tower, by your leave, my good and gracious lord, and let you younger hearts plan the downfall of Tasmôrden. I’m weary.”

“You’ve not had all your supper. And your advice would be welcome. Come upstairs with me and have the rest of your supper. Please, sir.”

Another lengthy silence, Emuin seeming distracted and weary. “You don’t hear me, do you? Nothing’s come to you? Crissand lured you out there. Crissand brought you to this shrine. And who is Crissand? What is Crissand?”

“My friend, sir. My loyal friend.” Dread afflicted him at the hearing. “Do you say otherwise?”

“Not so far as he wills.” Emuin’s lips trembled in the dim light, as if he would say more, and refrained. “He is Aswydd. And Amefin. And you are Mauryl’s. And have ever been.—Go to your guest. His arrival, too, is momentous, like this ragabones from the streets that you send to trouble the wisewomen. I’ll go to my room.”

“You’re angry, sir. I only wish the truth.”

“I’m in perfectly good sorts. I want my own tower. That number of stairs I can climb, none of this traipsing up to yours and down and up again. I grow weary of this up and down of this stairs, that stairs, come down to dinner, down to the guardroom, up again, pray. Your bones don’t know the pains of age, young sir. The steps yonder are a mountain, my tower equally so, but at least it leads to bed.”

“Sir.” Contrition moved him. He had raised his voice to Emuin, and wished nothing more than to have Emuin’s trust, and did not know how to win it. “I’ll have your supper sent.”

Emuin looked at him, old eyes, much the image of Mauryl’s, worried, and shaded by wrinkled lids. Flesh had fallen away, the lines had gone deeper since the summer. Emuin looked at him, however, and there seemed fire in the shadow of his eyes, the lively dance the candles made.

“Master Emuin, Auld Syes told me things. I’ve tried to tell them to you. Have you heard me?”

“Oh, indeed I’ve heard. Have you?”

“As much as I can understand.”

“Then more than I,” Emuin said. “I’ll go to my tower, in all goodwill, young lord.”

“Have I done well?”

Again that long stare. “You’ve done very well,” Emuin said unexpectedly, and walked away, leaving him to his puzzlement, but hugging that last as dearly as a cloak against a bitter wind. The old man looked frail as he walked away, frail and fragile, in that hallway that had never felt safe.

It did not feel safe tonight, less so than ordinarily. Many of the candles were out. It was the east wing draft, again, and the servants battled it, lighting and relighting the candles, and never yet had they found the reason of it: for years and years, the servants said, candles there had gone out.

And the stairs to Emuin’s tower equally well suffered from it, especially when Emuin opened his door.

“Syllan,” Tristen said.

“M’lord.”

“Go with him. See he’s provided for. Make tea for him.”

Tristen was never to be without at least two guards, but Uwen counted among them. Syllan bowed his head and went after master Emuin, while he and his armed companions continued up the stairs.

“Master Emuin’s sayin’ there’s troubles,” Uwen muttered on the way up to his apartment. “An’ dangers, an’ what good are we simple lads when it’s wizards?”

“I don’t think that’s to fear now,” he said. “The things we have to fear I hope are all across the river at the moment.”

“If that was so, ye wouldn’t need us.”

Uwen had right on his side.

“I wish I had been more moderate with him,” Tristen said. “I made him angry.” He had been angry himself, and that had never been his habit. He regarded the past moments with some dismay, and recalled he had been angry with Parsynan, for good reason, and angry at the archivist’s murder, and angry at the workmen underfoot. He had been angry, in fact, for days, and felt as if never yet had he been able to lay aside the sword… that was the feeling he had. He was different from Men. He was different still when he took up the sword, and until he laid it down, and he felt as if he had taken it up at the gates of Amefel and never since been able to let it go.

And now he had fairly shouted at Emuin, or would have, if there were not the witnesses, and he had cast Cuthan out, and sent Parsynan on his way afoot, and done very many things that he would never have done until he had unsheathed the sword at the gates of Henas’amef.

He did not know what to do about it, save to continue to carry it, and to defend the town as he had begun to do. But, he said to himself as he came to the level of the hall, he could not go about full of temper. He had yet to learn how to carry the sword and not use it, that was the thing. He supposed that Cefwyn managed, and that Uwen did, and other men who had soldiering for a profession… for that he was very good with the sword did not mean it entirely protected those who were on his side.

Had he not gone alone across the field at Emwy? Had he not endangered all those trying to protect him?

There seemed a sober lesson in that, and he thought that Emuin might have delivered that lesson to him without a word, only by his absence. It was with a far quieter tread that he came up on the doors where his other guards waited, Aren and Tawwys, with the Ivanim escort… and the presence of the latter advised him that Cevulirn had not left, for which he was humbly grateful.

“I need guards against assassins,” he said to Uwen as they walked into the foyer. “I think the Elwynim will try, at least. I fear more for my friends. For you. Be on your guard.”

“Wi’ Tasmôrden in charge over there,” Uwen said, “I expect ’em, aye, before all’s done; and now ye take in that light-fingered boy, which worries me for other reasons. He’ll gossip all to Ness, an’, m’lord, ye ha’ rumors enow.”

It was true. And it was worth considering.

Cevulirn sat, done with his supper, a cup of wine in hand, his feet before the fire… Tassand’s arranging, certainly: Cevulirn’s head was bowed, and he looked tired; but Cevulirn looked up with a level and completely wary stare as Tristen arrived at the fireside.

“It’s settled,” he said to Cevulirn, and sat down in the matching chair, waving Uwen and also Lusin on to the remnant of their supper. “Thank you for waiting.”

“Will my lord eat?” Tassand asked, quietly at his elbow.

“I’ve had enough,” he said, in every effort to answer his staff kindly; and deftly as a whisper of soles on the floor Tassand set a cup of wine in his hand and a plate of sweet cakes on the small table within carry of his hand. “Thank you, Tassand.”

“My lord.” Tassand absented himself then. They held the fireside to themselves, and still Cevulirn asked no questions, but curiosity… that was in the air.

“It was a boy I’d been looking for,” Tristen said.

“Ah.”

“A boy with the gift. As you have,” he said to Cevulirn, chasing a small gray thought into the tangle of intentions. Cevulirn was one like Paisi, one he was reluctant to give up, a man essential also to Cefwyn’s safety.

And Cevulirn glanced down, a momentary veiling of that gray stare, and that was as much truth as needed be between them. There was no need to press him. Cevulirn knew why he was here, knew his own value, at least that he had been moved enough to act. Crissand, also gifted, had felt ill at ease in the ride, and taken a small army for an escort. The boy Paisi might deny he had anything but luck after being taken up by the guard, but all these things had come on one day: the winds were blowing as they would and the coincidences of their meeting diminished to none.

And tonight, when his heart searched the gray space and the land around him, he knew unfinished tasks, unanswered questions… all these things, and knew the evening had provided him more essential pieces than he had had in the morning, even in his visit to stir Emuin forth from his tower. He knew all the gaps in the wards, both of the Zeide and of Henas’amef; and such faults in his defense as he could shore up, he had repaired.

But he felt uneasy in Auld Syes’ appearance; uneasy in the overthrow of the oak; uneasy in the fact that he lacked officers and lords fit to maintain order while he fared out; uneasy that he lacked an army at his disposal when the border was a long, wooded, unobserved river between his fields and Elwynor, and he had never so much as seen those lands.

“Will you stay with me?” he asked Cevulirn. “Or must you ride south again?”

“I have affairs to set in order in my own land,” Cevulirn said, “and a muster to raise, considering the spring: this in the chance His Majesty will call me.”

The tainted south, Cefwyn had said. That phrase would not leave Tristen’s thinking: wrong, wrong, wrong, it was, and yet there was Cefwyn’s reasoning.

“And if he will not, and will not call me,” Tristen said, “yet the border is my border; and I will not permit Elwynim to fight on Amefin soil. Cefwyn says the north must win the war; but I say the south mustn’t lose it.”

“Well said; very well said; and if Your Grace wished me to winter here, and my men and horses under canvas, here or at the border, that we might do, if you deem it needful… or even convenient… so the south should not lose the war.”

Perhaps it was that hint of wizard-gift he had felt in Cevulirn, that among the lords of the south and north, he had always felt greatest affinity for this lean gray man.

“Tasmôrden in besieging Ilefínian,” Tristen said, “promised the Amefin aid if they would rebel. But that’s failed. Now I have the province, and I only wish Cefwyn would let us cross to Ilefínian.”

“So I urged on His Majesty and His Majesty’s Commander,” Cevulirn said.

“I begged Cefwyn send the both of us, but he still said the attack must come from the north.”

“For fear of Ryssand and Murandys.” Tristen shook his head. “And yet he relies on them.”

“He is Guelen,” Cevulirn said. “He has that firm idea that heavy horse and pikemen are the secure heart of his army. He and I have argued that point long and hard. But that’s what he says to hide the truth of his reasons… the real reason he went home this summer. He had dissent within the Guelens. He saw danger in Murandys, danger in Ryssand’s ambition, and most of all in Ryssand’s influence with the Quinalt. If we had driven north to Ilefínian this summer, if we had set Her Grace on the throne and all had gone as smoothly as we could wish—he would have had to come home to Guelemara and present them an alliance with Elwynor which Ryssand would have opposed. And that would have stirred the north to join Ryssand, and Nelefreissan, Isin, Murandys for a certainty… the kingdom would have split. He faced them to fight for the Elwynim treaty and his marriage on level ground, and by all evidences, he’s won over most of the lords. Only when Ryssand assailed Her Grace’s honor, then he would have drawn and broken with Ryssand and Murandys, to the ruin of all the kingdom if they took up arms. Gods help the realm—and thank the gods for the letter you sent him. There we have our hope of being called and Ryssand being sent home. But we must be ready… ready to move so quickly the north can muster no objection.”

“To stand under arms this winter? Cefwyn forbade us because he had to forbid us. But might not lords come here to hold a council—with very large escorts? We border Elwynor. Crissand thought it necessary to have a large escort. Might not others?”

“Lord of Amefel, you’ve grown very devious.”

The stillness had become so great that the crackle of the fire was a third voice. From Uwen and Lusin, somewhat removed, came not a sound.

“What we did this summer, we could do again,” Tristen said. “Could we not? Keep the signal fires ready, as we did at Lewenbrook, have all preparation made, so if Tasmôrden thinks of coming this way he daren’t. Do we feast at Midwinter? Have I heard that right? Might I invite my friends to supper? Is that the way lords conceal their intentions?

“With polite pretenses, none of which anyone of sense believes, and which no one dares question to one’s face?”

It was what he had seen at Guelemara, and it was heart and soul of the pretenses he had seen Cefwyn and Ryssand make over and over again. The practical use of it had Unfolded like a new word, sure as a well-balanced blade.

“But if we have all those escorts sitting here,” Tristen said, “and if we have an army, won’t the northern lords know then we’re loyal to Cefwyn? And might not Lord Umanon come to us, rather than to the rest of the Guelens? And if he comes, wouldn’t Llymaryn and Marisel listen to Cefwyn rather than Ryssand? And if Tasmôrden had to worry what we intended, might he divide his attention between us and Cefwyn? And might not the Elwynim who support Her Grace take heart?”

Again that small silence. “Your Grace,” Cevulirn said, “you are no fool.”

“Emuin says I am. So does Idrys. I was a fool only an hour ago, and made Emuin angry with me. But I know that Corswyndam and Prichwarrin will lie and do everything to their own benefit and none of Cefwyn’s, and if Cefwyn has only them to rely on, they’ll make demands at every moment Cefwyn needs something from them.”

“That’s true.”

“So let him have us. Cefwyn says he can’t muster the south for fear of offending the north. But the north doesn’t approve of us whether we muster or not. We’ve marched together. We know our order in camp. We know all those things. We don’t have to argue the way the northerners argue. We can just set up a camp, and this spring, when Cefwyn moves, we move across the river, set our camp on the far shore, and let Tasmôrden make what he will of it. Cefwyn forbade us to win the war. But he set me here to guard the border. I’ll guard it—from Tasmôrden’s side of the river.”

“You have Ivanor with you,” Cevulirn said with the fire shining in his eyes. “Olmern, Lanfarnesse… all will come.”

“Will Imor, do you think?” Lord Umanon had always stood off from the others, in his brief experience, and detested the newly made lord of Olmern. “I’m least sure of him; but it seems he’s more one of us than he is fond of Murandys. And if we had him with us, we’d have the entire middle of Ylesuin listening to him.”

“He detests Murandys. That’s certain. Let me send letters. If I summon them in my name, it won’t forewarn the north. Nothing unusual at all in my messengers going back and forth… gods know the northern lords would like to know what we say to one another, but they’ll imagine far too much if you sent the messages. —Your health, Amefel.” Cevulirn lifted his cup and drank deep, here among the brazen dragons and green draperies that had been the scene of fatality with such cups. “Your long rule… Lord Sihhë, lord of Amefel and Althalen.”

“Never say so.” He felt heat touch his face, ill at ease with Cevulirn’s fey and talkative mood. “The people do. I discourage it.”

“You are what you are. And fortunate for His Majesty that you’ve been a faithful friend. I don’t stand in your path, nor wish to.”

“Emuin says the like, and I wish he would. I need his advice.”

“I bestow mine. His Majesty is in dire danger, and the danger isn’t at all that you’re Sihhë, lord of Amefel. The danger isn’t even that our king is Guelen and wed to an Elwynim. The danger is that Selwyn Marhanen established his throne on his blackguardly betrayal of a trusting lord, and Ináreddrin Marhanen established his throne on the unsatisfied ambitions of his father’s rivals, both of them playing one lord against the other and one son against the other all for fear of assassination… exactly what happened to Ináreddrin, as it turned out; but a man makes his fate, and so do kings.”

“What do you say?”

“That Cefwyn’s throne, mark you, is set on a stone Ryssand demanded of him… and never was there a greater mistake than granting that and granting Ryssand any power. Expediency, expediency, expediency, grant this, grant that, all in the name of this marriage, this war, and all on the excuse of dire threat from Tasmôrden, who has only become a threat worth the name at all because Cefwyn would not cross the river immediately after Lewenbrook and take the Elwynim capital for Her Grace. Now, yes, Tasmôrden has slaughtered his rivals, increased his army, and will slaughter Her Grace’s partisans such as exist this winter when the capital falls. Next spring, we will slaughter his, as last summer, Aseyneddin and before him, Caswyddian, slaughtered all who opposed him. Another year of this and there’ll be no man alive in Elwynor but starving peasantry and liars and weathercocks who swing to every wind that blows… no fit population for greatness, that. There, Amefel. I’m not reputed a man of many words, and I’ve just spent my entire store, the distilled opinion of six months in His Majesty’s close company.”

“He does regard your opinion.”

“Regard it he may. But His Majesty has had my good advice, Idrys’ good advice, Her Grace’s good advice, and your good advice, and ignored it for bad, all to please Corswyndam of Ryssand, who had a kinglike power in the last reign and to no one’s wonder is our monarch’s rival for authority in this one. There is the man who will yet do us greater harm than Tasmôrden, mark me. His Majesty believes he may subdue that man by wit, not force, and I say a stout fence is the only solution to an ass that will not keep its pasture.”

He had heard the truth. Everything he had himself observed said that Cevulirn told the matter fairly, and reached some conclusion of his own.

“What does a good lord do with the like of Ryssand, sir?”

“To whom is it necessary that a lord be good, Amefel?”

“To his people, sir.”

“So say I. And Cefwyn knows the answer. He only hopes the answer to Ryssand’s defiance will be something different if he can be more clever tomorrow. But the plain truth is, his good and loyal subjects should not be subject to Corswyndam’s spite today. The king has his bride and his treaty now. He has no more leisure to temporize with a self-seeking baron, and his people have none for him to do so.” Cevulirn set down an empty cup. “I’m well content to have Ryssand for an enemy. I prefer that man facing me, not at my back, for my people’s sake as well as my own. Would Cefwyn would come to his senses.”

“I understand everything you say, sir,” Tristen said. “And I agree.”

“So share a second cup, and I’ll go tamely to my bed, having committed treason enough for an evening. I’ll stay with you the few more days, go home to set things in order, and by Midwinter… ride back here again, with all necessary force if you aren’t in jest.”

“I am not in jest. Henas’amef will supply you with every need, firewood, canvas, grain, whatever you will have. I have a hundred of the Guelen Guard and two hundred of the Dragons, who must go back when spring comes. In the meantime they’re at my orders. Lord Parsynan did nothing to raise a muster, and he did nothing to replace the weapons and equipage after Lewenbrook.” He had not intended to enumerate Parsynan’s failings, and went instead to his point. “My promise to Cefwyn didn’t mean letting Tasmôrden cross before we stopped him. We’ll have the bridges in our hands.”

Something in the exchange pricked Cevulirn’s odd humor. “Indeed,” Cevulirn said. “And before I go… perhaps I should have a view of those bridges myself.”

Tristen had no idea whether Emuin had listened to what he and Cevulirn said, but it was his impression the old man had withdrawn from all of it in truth, shut the door to his tower and held aloof from lords making plans he would not advise.

Uwen, however, had heard everything.

“Is it folly?” he asked Uwen, in consequence, after Cevulirn had left and when Tassand and the servants were disrobing him for bed. “I think he means nothing but good to Cefwyn, and I don’t think he’s a fool. I trust him.”

Uwen had long since inured himself to questions of that nature, and passing judgment on what Uwen called his betters. Uwen would do it, in private, and quietly. “He ain’t a fool, that ’un, never was.” But the look Uwen gave him after was still troubled, something unsaid, and Uwen waited, gazing into the small fire in the bedchamber, until Tassand and the servants, trusted as they were, had left the room.

So Uwen would do, if he had something to say in absolute privacy, and Tristen gathered a robe about himself for warmth and went to the fireside. The light cast a fire glow over Uwen’s face, brightest on the silver of his hair, which nowadays he wore clubbed, growing longer after the fashion of a man of rank.

“’At boy, an’ his lordship the earl, an’ Cevulirn,” Uwen said, “is all of a piece, m’lord, that woman an’ all… the witch.”

“Wise or not wise?”

Uwen’s face turned profile to him, eyes set on the fire. “Wisht I knew, lad. I ain’t th’ man to advise a duke.”

“You called me lad.”

“That I did, an’ beg pardon. I shouldn’t have done’t.”

“Call me that, and tell me the truth. Am I a fool?”

Uwen’s gaze swung back to him, earnest, surreal in the firelight and shadow. “I ain’t th’ one to say that, m’lord.”

“Uleman called me king. Auld Syes said the lord of Amefel and the aetheling; and the second she meant was Crissand. I know it was. Crissand is the aethelings’ heir. She meant he should be lord here. And what should I be? What should I be, Uwen?”

“What she said was a lot muddled,” Uwen said soberly, “but there ain’t but one king in Ylesuin, and anything else is treason, lad, just so’s ye know’t. I’d follow ye at any odds, but so’s ye know, I don’t think His Majesty wants to hear any king in Amefel. I don’t think His Grace of Ivanor wants to hear it either, and His Grace of Ivanor won’t follow you over that brink. I would, but he won’t.”

It was dire to think of any king but Cefwyn; and he would not think it. “I know that. And I would never do anything against Cefwyn.”

“Yet I think His Majesty has his own idea what ye are, lad, an’ His Majesty’s Commander ain’t in doubt.”

“Has Idrys talked to you? Can you say?”

“Oh, I’ll say, m’lord. Ye’re my lord, an’ the Lord Commander don’t expect otherwise when he talks to me, as I confess he did, before we left Guelemara.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, reasonable things. Sayin’ I should have a care, an’ not let ye do anything rash, an’ to watch your back, m’lord. The Lord Commander wishes ye better ’n ye might think. Ye may be what ye are, but ye ain’t Lord Ryssand, an’ ye ain’t ever asked for Amefel: it was His Majesty give it to ye, wi’ His blessing an’ His Holiness’s blessing to boot, so, aye, His Majesty was the one who made the Holy Father willin’. It weren’t the other way around. And ye can rest a’ nights knowin’ His Majesty knows what ye are, an’ still stands by ye, ’gainst Ryssand an’ the Quinalt and all of ’em.”

The low music of Uwen’s voice was sweet to him, stilling fears, allaying anxieties and doubts, and telling him things he longed with all his heart to believe.

“You don’t fear me, Uwen.”

“Ye keep askin’, an’ it’s the same answer, m’lord. Ye should have answered master Emuin a wee bit softer, but ’e understands, same as me, it’s a man’s weight ye carry now, an’ a burdensome weight it is: small wonder if ye feel it. Yet ye should answer him softer.”

“I know. I repent of it. I repented the moment I’d done it.”

“M’lord, I ain’t findin’ fault.”

“No. Fool. Fool is what Idrys would say. And Mauryl. Auld Syes frightened Emuin. And yet, yet she only warns, by all I know. What wizards do… that’s another question.”

“It’s above me, m’lord. Far above me… what wizards do.”

“What I do, what Mauryl’s done, what Emuin’s done… all these things… tie one to the other. Cevulirn didn’t come because Auld Syes wished it. And who raised the storm, Uwen? Who raised the storm?”

“It damn sure weren’t natural, m’lord. An’ whatever happened at that place, it ain’t what it was when we rode in. That great tree uprooted… like whatever were there, was all done, old as it was: ’at was what I thought of. It was old, an’ it was all done and broke.”

“That it was.” He saw in memory the ancient tree, its roots ripped from shadow to light, out of whatever secret places they had grown, deep in the earth, under it, among the old stones. Shadows might well have broken out. They might have followed Auld Syes, or her daughter. That, too, Emuin must have seen, as he had seen it.

He shivered, barefoot on the warm stones, beset by the draft in the room. The dragons loomed above them, and cast fire-shadow of dragons on the ceiling, all points and coils, enveloping all they did.

“I should write soon,” he said. It was scarcely a fortnight since the last letter, which must move by courier over snowy roads, and at hardship to man and horse.

“To His Majesty?”

“To Cefwyn, yes. Idrys said as often as I wished, I should write. The last I wrote was about Cuthan.”

“Letters has a way of strayin’, m’lord. And for the sweet gods’ sake don’t write about meetin’ wi’ Ivanor.”

“I know.” He was not so new to the world he did not imagine what Ryssand would do with such a letter in his hands. “I expected Cefwyn would write to me.”

“A man new-married don’t think o’ writin’ letters, m’lord. On the other hand… maybe he has. The last king’s messenger didn’t have all that luck, did he?”

It was true. Edwyll’s men had killed him. Edwyll, Crissand’s father.

But with Cevulirn here, and the other lords to come… he found himself wondering what he could say, or should say, and knew no one he could send who would get a spoken confidence assuredly to Cefwyn. Even among the king’s heralds… some had been the old king’s men; and those could as well be Ryssand’s, even if they came to him. Fool he might be, but he had understood that.

“I’ll write,” he said, “such as I can, and wish him to understand what I can’t set down by pen. I’ll write, when I know how things stand at the river.”

Chapter 6

Cefwyn’s head hurt, where the crown had pressed on it. On this bleak, cold morning he sat at solitary breakfast at a small table near windows which gave far too much light, and craned his neck painfully askew to look at his black-humored Lord Commander of the Guard.

“Tea,” he muttered to the nearest page. “Now. For the Lord Commander as well. Sit down, master crow, you’re a spot against the sun.”

Idrys drew back one of the three chairs and settled his armored body carefully on brocade and painted wood. Idrys had appeared like toadstools in the morning, showing no evidence of headache or other inconvenience… a countenance that rarely changed, be it calamity or triumph Idrys had to relay.

“So what’s amiss?” he asked Idrys.

“Did I say aught was amiss?” Idrys countered. “There might be good news.”

“And horses will learn carpentry,” Cefwyn said, “before master crow bears all good news. Spill it. Out with it. Where’s Tasmôrden this morning?”

“Freezing outside Ilefínian, to this hour, if luck holds. No, my news is not Tasmôrden. Nor even Lord Tristen.”

“Thank the gods.”

“Luriel.”

“I make my thanksgiving provisional.”

“No, no, quite appropriate, my lord king. The lady established herself very well with Panys last night.”

“Established.”

“Spent the night in his chambers.”

Cefwyn arched a brow, in spite of the sun, and meanwhile the page arrived with the new pot and a second cup. He let the lad pour, waggled fingers, sent him out of the range of gossip.

“She certainly wasted no time in that siege. Tasmôrden should employ her.”

“Half the men in the hall last night entertained similar ambitions.”

“Only half?”

“The rest know Prichwarrin.”

“And doubtless some have known Luriel.—In his chambers, you say. Playing at draughts, you say? Discussing sanctity?”

“She does have a certain forwardness,” Idrys remarked drily.

“Gods. How could I have been so blind?”

“As what? To have entertained a notion of marriage?”

“As to have had the vixen in my bed, gods save me, and gods save Ylesuin.”

“Panys doesn’t mind. The lady’s dowry will be Murandys, her uncle’s detestation notwithstanding, so long as she keeps her head.”

“That lovely head is very well protected,” Cefwyn muttered, and grimaced at the bitterness of the tea. Or was it the headache? “A wedding is almost certainly in the future, then, and agreeable to the lady as well.”

“It would seem so.”

“So master crow becomes the messenger of weddings.” He furrowed his brow against the glare of sun. “I thought it was a dove.”

“A crow is quite enough for Murandys,” Idrys said, buttering a bit of bread. “The lady’s dear uncle is not utterly pleased. His niece won’t easily forgive him her sojourn in disgrace… little likelihood of any reconciliation there until it’s to the lady’s clear advantage, as we both know of this lady. There’s every likelihood that the lady will divulge all manner of his secrets to her new love, who, though young, is no fool. He’ll bring them all to his father, and his father will most likely approach Your Majesty or Your Majesty’s duly appointed representative, with all manner of these tidbits, in due course. This, granted Murandys finds no way to buy his niece’s silence. Yet what can Murandys do but put a good face on it? His one offspring gets only daughters. And he’ll no more beget another heir himself than horses will fly. Once Luriel produces a son, he’ll put as good a face on it as the lady will allow.”

“She’ll spend Panys dry and move on to her uncle’s treasury.”

“Your Majesty’s support would, of course, sustain Panys against the lady’s depredations… and make sure whose ear those early reports find.”

She would not spend rustic Panys completely dry, to be sure: their wealth was in apples, not gold, and her tastes were extravagant, requiring other than cider barrels: the orchards were Crown grant and could not be sold. But she would drive Panys’ offspring to an importance within the royal councils and a passion for trade and gold that Panys could never otherwise hope to attain… and that was good for the monarchy, for Murandys linked with rustic Panys instead of Ryssand would guarantee him a far more tranquil reign.

Could he justify the expense of a gift to Panys, say, an establishment of some additional income, and cloak it from Murandys’ objections?

“The lady herself is no fool,” Cefwyn said. His own liaison with the lady had been, at that time, a practical necessity, the heir of Ylesuin with the niece of a powerful baron of that unholy Ryssandish alliance, until the marriage had shipwrecked on a riskier, more advantageous match with a better-dowered woman he also loved, deeply and passionately. “What more can we ask?”

Idrys took a sip of tea, put the cup down, set his forearms before him on the table, and looked very sober. “Shall I answer that, my lord king?”

This was not good news. He foreknew it, and waved a hand in signal that Idrys should speak.

Idrys did. “We might ask discretion of Lord Tristen. He’s done very well in sending the letter that silenced Ryssand, in subduing the rebellion that prevented a southern war. But my very reliable informant says charms are sold in the market again, and that the people hail him Lord Sihhë whenever he rides in the streets.”

“So they did when I rode with him. This is nothing new.”

“That the son of Meiden knelt to swear him allegiance and hailed him aetheling.”

That was worth a moment of silence, at least. “To spite Guelen authority. I did read your report.”

“The Quinalt there is distressed, and sent a letter to the Holy Father, who has not brought it to my lord king.”

“I trust the Holy Father in Guelessar knows where his safety is and will reassure this priest. Good gods, the Quinalt in Amefel is used to witchery. Whence this complaint?”

“Whence, indeed?”

“Ryssand?”

“Oh, his letters also go to the Quinaltine.” Idrys took a sip of tea. “But far more feet than two leave the Quinalt every day, and I can’t follow all of them at once.”

“Those that go to Ryssand would be a benefit.”

“That I have done. Unfortunately, I cannot follow through the doors.”

“Well find the way! Where is your invention?”

“Time. Time, my lord king. One of Ryssand’s servants met with mischance, a kettle of oil in the kitchens. Another dead, a fall on the stairs. I’ve other ears there, but none so well placed, and I reserve them against greater need than my suspicion that priests from the Quinalt go to Ryssand’s priest. I know that conduit, and I assume that sewage flows. Beware Ryssand, I say. Beware his priests, and watch their actions.”

“The damned northern orthodoxy.”

“The northern orthodoxy, indeed. I’ve warned Lord Tristen. I warned him before he left, to make public gestures of favor to the Amefin Quinalt. More, I advised his advisers.”

“Well done in that.” The whole question of Tristen’s innocence wandering through the maze of Quinalt, Teranthine, and Bryalt ambitions in Amefel was enough to curdle milk. “I’d suspect Ryssand’s fingers are inside Amefel in more than Parsynan’s case. The Quinalt there I never did trust.”

“And Tristen is not utterly circumspect. I have also to report, unless something intervened, Parsynan’s baggage is still in Henas’amef, and the carts have gone to the river.”

“My carts?”

“He sent all your carts to the river, whence reports may be more scant: he also sent my informant there, who could not, of course, protest the mission, except to dispatch a man to advise me about the orders. I assume they’ve gone.”

“And what does he think he’s doing?”

“Dispatching supply to the borders. He’s also declined to send home the Guelen Guard or Anwyll’s detachment of the Dragons. They are not delayed. He’s kept them all, and it seems he’s reinforcing the river border. In all honesty, in my opinion, a service.”

Cefwyn heaved a heavy, a considerate sigh. “He’ll have my carts stranded in drifts, and then what will we do? But he doesn’t think of that.”

“Or he hopes to banish the snow. Conjure it from his path.”

He was unsure whether that was humor. “Reinforcing that border is no sin, I agree. Good for him, I say, carts and all. And he has no house guard but the Guelens in the garrison, and my troops. He’s not the mooncalf now. And regarding this mission to the river, pray, you never told me. I trust you told no one else.”

“At this moment, in Guelessar, Anwyll’s courier knows. But, of course, the Quinalt father in Amefel knows… which does add possibilities to the list of the knowledgeable.”

“Priests! Priests at every turn. I grow very weary of priests.”

“At least the Holy Father has remained constant to his best interests. But priests disaffected from Your Majesty will not go to the Holy Father, and I doubt ones alarmed by Tristen’s doings will go to him.”

“Where will they go?”

“Where indeed?”

“No wide guess, is it? I’ll tell you, master crow, the Holy Father fears Ryssand; so does Sulriggan.” He considered the alliances involved and heaved a sigh. “Damn him! —Why am I here, with all my friends exiled to the south, in favor of fools and grasping old men in the north whom I little love? Tell me that, crow.”

“Your grandfather weeded his garden severely from time to time. Your father was too complacent. I’ve no idea what you will be, my lord king, but if you prove complacent, I fear for us.”

He knew precisely what Idrys counseled. “There’s Murandys, keystone of the entire effort in the spring, the staging point of our advance. Shall I remove him, pray, and have Luriel lead my forces? Or young Panys, straight from his mother’s arms? I need these conniving old men, damn them. At least they’ve fought in the border war.”

“So has all the south.”

“Yet I rule here.”

“Move the capital.”

He gave a rueful, startled laugh. “You jest.”

“You say your power is in the south. Rule there.”

The Marhanen had no welcome in Henas’amef—to parade through its streets, perhaps. But to rule? “Not for living there,” he admitted. “Not possible.”

“Then rule here,” was Idrys’ succinct counsel, “and don’t look to do otherwise, my lord king.”

Idrys had a way of slipping past his guard with a telling argument. And therein he did. Rule here. Rule Ryssand. That was the point wherein Idrys thought he failed as a king. It stung.

Idrys meanwhile finished his cup and rose, unbidden. “I’ve business downstairs, my lord king. I beg your leave.”

“Go,” he said, but his stare was meanwhile at the white, wintry light, the frosted panes.

Rule, indeed. As if he did not. Rule here. As if he did not.

Was not Murandys in check, and Ryssand home, disabled? And had he not set the south firmly in order, with Cevulirn attending business and Tristen there, in charge.

Gods knew what Tristen would do in ruling Amefel, but he knew what things Tristen would not countenance, one such being dishonesty in the taxes and the other being any hostile incursion into the territory he was set to guard. Any adventure of Elwynim across the river would turn out to Tasmôrden’s extreme regret, Cefwyn had every confidence. He had less in Tristen’s forbearance from magic, but at least it would be magic outside the witness of Guelenfolk; and by the time the rumors did get to common lips they would have the flavor of ordinary gossip, a little less credible by their remove from Guelen lands and ordinary sights and doings.

Idrys chided him, and advised him to harsh measures, but he had secured the southern frontier with two broad strokes, not an arrow expended. That was the very point of what he considered wise rule, that things happened quietly and without fuss. Was Idrys not the master of such strokes, and did Idrys decry his quiet management of the south, which had defied his father and ultimately killed him?

No. It was not the south where Idrys faulted him. It was the north where he had not covered himself with glory, and Idrys was right, at least in his observation. That Ryssand was home and out of mischief was thanks to Cevulirn’s sacrifice more than by his own cleverness; and by that stroke he might have been rid of Ryssand’s poisonous influence in court for the winter, but he had lost Cevulirn’s valuable presence, the last southern presence in his court, at least for the winter, and had a blood feud between two of his barons as a consequence. Luriel was holding Murandys in check and keeping him from uniting with Ryssand, but, gods, that was no stable situation, all teetering on the edge of Luriel’s whims, her uncle’s spite, and the cleverness of Panys’ young son.

Marry the baggage off in haste, he thought. An estate to Panys, a royal wedding present to dazzle Luriel and keep her happy. He had the house of Aysonel in Panys, royal lands his remote kin had held, fine land, a good, anciently maintained chase among the oldest oaks in the north. The Crown could ill afford to diminish its holdings, but the Crown had them precisely for gifts of state importance: Panys was sensible and loyal, at least in this generation… gods knew what Luriel’s example could make of their mutual offspring in the next.

But by the time Luriel’s descendants were old enough to commit their indiscretions, the Elwynim question would be settled, granted the gods’ goodwill.

And there was Panys’ older brother, who would inherit Panys itself, another sober, reasonable lad, gods save him and his sire from accidents and Ryssand’s ambition.

He supped down a cold remnant of tea, setting his thoughts on a second court wedding, as soon as practicable… and the couple not yet having presented themselves and their request.

“Call Annas,” he said to a passing page, and when his chamberlain appeared, even in advance of Ninévrisë’s venture forth on the day: “Strongly suggest to the son of Panys that I suggest discretion and haste. Midwinter. Midwinter would not be too soon.”

There was no way to have held the men silent on the sights they had seen, not with the presence of the lord of Ivanor to inspire close questions: so Uwen said, and so Tristen gathered of the things that echoed back to him; by noon of the bright, blue day after their ride it was certain in every tavern in Amefel that the men had seen a witch at Levey crossing in flashes of lightning and claps of winter thunder, that immediately after, ghostly trumpets had heralded Lord Ivanor and his party, who had left Toj Embrel only that hour… folly, but the heart of the matter was the same: the lord of Amefel had ridden out with the earl of Meiden and come back attended as well by Ivanor and his men; and on the way a witch had appeared to them, with portents as yet disputable.

Meanwhile the earls were all astir to know the meaning of it, and anxious to see the lord of Ivanor and hear from his own lips the doings in the Guelen court, as they called it. So it was Cevulirn’s door they beset, one visitor and another, all of which Tristen knew, and none of which he prevented.

It left him oddly free of petitioners and questions, so that he quietly fed the pigeons that came to his window, and even had leisure to watch their antics for a time, their pressing and shoving one another, the silly waddle about the ledge when they were sated. Their wings had quite cleared the snow from the ledge in that area, and the place below was only the courtyard, which was free of hazard and remarkably clear.

Boys ran and flung snowballs where lately men had battled and murder had been done, against that very wall.

How careless they were, he thought; with what lightness of heart they stalked one another and arranged their ambushes, and how sorrowful that later age filled their hands with iron. They were innocent, and thought it all a matter for laughter.

Through their midst, however, came a dark and purposeful figure, in a course from the South Gate toward the main doors. An angry man, Tristen thought, and recognized the cloaked and bundled portliness of His Reverence of the Quinalt as snowballs flew perilously close and spattered across the track just behind the man, prankish disregard of priestly authority.

It could not have sweetened the man’s mood.

He had the least but growing premonition the matter would reach him. He could think of no excuse to avoid it, and no one to whom the patriarch of the Quinalt might apply in such anger but to him.

And within a very little time, indeed, he received word from Tassand that His Reverence had lodged a protest with the provost and with the guard, and called for the arrest not of the boys with the snowballs, but of certain women in the market.

He knew what it was, then, and surmised even that the small, furtive shaft he had launched in that direction had not gone unremarked by the priests. At very least he had released a prisoner of the Guelen Guard, he had known he left men discontent at his back; and Guelenmen discontent and now a Guelen priest manifestly angry and lodging charges against old women in the market did assume a certain strange relationship in his thoughts.

And dared he forget the rumors Uwen said were running the town? The priest seemed to have said nothing about witches and storms or the lord of Ivanor, only old women and trinkets.

“Tell Emuin,” he said, for Idrys in his leaving Guelemara had warned him about priests, and advised him to cultivate their favor with gifts. He had made the gifts. He still had an angry priest on his doorstep… and Emuin was, if somehow not a priest, at least a sort of one, among the Teranthine. By his own preference he would wish to draw in the Bryalt clergy as well, for the sake of having yet one more priestly opinion to spread thin the Quinalt sense of absolute power and right to command everyone. He was not sure Emuin would come, in point of fact, but no Bryaltine had been near the guard last night; Emuin had, and he wished he had made the summons more absolute and more urgent. Uwen was out and about the duties of the garrison, something to do with the armory, and he was otherwise alone, but for Lusin and his guard.

So Tassand sped, and dispatched word downstairs to His Reverence of the Quinalt that there would be an audience as he petitioned, and went himself to advise Emuin he was urgently requested.

Meanwhile Tristen called one of the younger servants and decided on ducal finery… not so much that he cared to appear in splendor, as that he wished to allow Tassand the time it took to rouse Emuin out… likely from sleep, for the old man waked more of nights than by day, and kept his hours topsy-turvy of habit. In consideration of the priest, he chose not the black of Ynefel, but his new coat, Amefin red—his only such coat, as happened, but he counted it wise not to receive the Quinalt bearing the colors and symbols of a Sihhë lordship he well knew were anathema to the Quinalt.

And at his own pace and hoping for Emuin’s swift arrival, he came downstairs with Uwen, to the little audience hall, the old one, where servants had lit candles. It had been cold when Cefwyn had it and it was cold now, where the patriarch waited in his outdoor cloak, tucked up like an angry winter sparrow. To Tristen’s great relief Emuin had arrived in greater haste than he had shown for any business since his arrival in Amefel, appearing in spotless gray robes and orderly, except the wind had caught his white-streaked hair and had it standing wispily on end.

“Your Grace,” said the patriarch in no good cheer.

Tristen walked to the ducal throne and sat down. “Sir.”

“I have come from the market.”

“I am aware, sir. And from the provost and with a complaint of some nature regarding women in the market.”

That might have cut short half an hour’s oration. At least having his business set in sum caused the patriarch’s mouth to open and shut and reset itself, while Emuin tucked his hands in his wide sleeves and looked for all the world like an owl roused by daylight.

“Your Grace, Your Grace, not merely old women, but a danger to the town, and I pray Your Grace’s sober attention to this matter. These otherwise laughable trinket-sellers are out openly in the square in daylight, with forbidden goods, flouting His Majesty’s law and canon law alike, and selling poisons and other noxious powders in the open. I ask Your Grace order the provost to act on it forthwith.”

“Poisons,” he said. He had expected nothing of poisons.

—So do I sell them, said Emuin quietly, for rats and mice, given the snows do drive the creatures out of the fields and into granaries. They’re generally better than charms, even mine.

“I have come here in all seriousness, Your Grace, expecting a hearing from a man reputed the friend of His Majesty!”

“I am listening, sir.” It was, in fact, a small lapse he had committed, in wondering, and master Emuin in answering. He saw a peril in seeming distracted; but he had no intention of arresting the grandmothers with their small traffic: if there were magic, it was nothing that afflicted anyone that he could tell.

“These women, Your Grace, generally they are women of dubious station and practice…”

“Widows,” said Emuin. “Earning a small living from herbs and cures, and the poisoning of rats.”

“If it please you,” the patriarch said sharply, “allow me to speak in my turn and you in yours, brother cleric.”

“I take your reproof,” Emuin said, hand on the Teranthine sigil which hung in view on his breast. He made a respectful little bow, or half of one. “Pray inform His Grace about the poisons. He has no knowledge of rat-killing.”

“For rats or whatever they be!” the patriarch said in great vexation. “The good gods know how they’re commonly used, to rid wives of unwanted husbands, or granaries of mice. Mice are not in question here. Witchcraft is.”

It had been fair weather in Henas’amef, given the cold. The trinket-sellers he had seen in his limited faring out in the town braved the cold in far thinner cloaks than His Reverence wore for this room. And His Reverence had walked down the hill the morning after he had set Paisi at liberty. That coincidence seemed less strange beneath than on the surface of matters.

“Wizardry is not forbidden, either by king’s law or by the gods’ law,” Emuin said. “Your Reverence mistakes the law.”

“We speak here of witchcraft, of sorcery…”

“Witchcraft and wizardry are one; it’s Guelenfolk, not wizards, who’ve made that division, and the king will support me in it, I well know the law and the rule of my order, Your Reverence: trust that I and my order know whereof we speak. And sorcery? These pitiful women couldn’t raise a sot from his slumbers, let alone master a shadow of any potency.”

“They trade in forbidden coinage, in which His Majesty surely has an interest.”

“Only in seeing good silver come out of hoards and into his revenues, if it were traded, which it is not. The amulets are half at least fraudulent, copper, brother, mere copper, which raises the worth of the copper, but the silver when they do find it is commonly melted and worn for bangles and rings here, as by your long tenure you might know.”

“The king’s law forbids that traffic! As you should know in your tenure in the capital, sir!”

“The late Lord Heryn enforced the king’s law only when the king’s son was in the town to see it, and the king has no interest whatsoever in confiscating trumpery trinkets and piddling rat-charms. Ask where half the Amefin treasury found its metal. There’s your question.”

“This is pointless talk! The issue is the law, brother, however blithely your all too tolerant order may wink at sorcery, both as a concept and a practice!”

“Sir,” Tristen said. “Master Emuin will not countenance sorcery. Nor will these women.”

“Selling charms!”

“Wizardry,” Emuin retorted. “Honest wizardry, which is within the tenets of their faith, recognized by the king and council and perfectly legitimate, however you disapprove it.”

“It’s a thin line,” the patriarch said stiffly, “crossing right over to blackest practice.”

“No, sir,” said Emuin, “it is not. It is not a thin line, it’s a gaping chasm! That’s the very point here, and those women with their little charms work against sorcery, not for it… as good maintain a rushlight against the darkest night of winter, but there they are, these poor folk, to tend a baby with the colic or drive the rats from a poor man’s store of seed grain. Sorcery destroys. Sorcery corrupts. Sorcery empowers the shadows and a man whether gifted or not is a fool, sir, who seeks to reach into the shadows and gain knowledge. A greater sorcerer is still a fool, who seeks to reach there and bring something across for his own benefit. Greatest of all fools, Hasufin Heltain, who sought to steal himself from the shadows and have them all, the living and the dead, in the clutch of his greedy fingers!”

The walls rang with Emuin’s anger, and silence followed it, a deep, troubling silence. Emuin had never been so forward with the truth, and Tristen heard it in a profound distress.

No less so the patriarch, whose face had gone red with anger, then pale with what he had heard.

“And what brings such dangers, but wizardry!”

“The greed of men, of which we have plenty in the world! And, aye, I practiced wizardry in those days, and do now, brother, and shall continue to do, whereby we shall not see another shadow roll down on Amefel, to gobble up the defense of good men and pious. Your Duchess Orien was the one to look to, subtle and dangerous, but ultimately evident to us by her workings, as I assure Your Reverence any sorcery in the lower town would make itself felt in short order.”

“You say so. I don’t have your source of confidence, I thank the gods for it.”

“Thank your young Lord Tristen, who stood between you and the fall of this province. Thank those of us who detected sorcery in practice and stopped it! And thank your Lord Tristen and His Majesty, bearing arms against an invasion that would have swept through this province like flood. And yes, that was sorcery, on its way to Guelessar and all provinces else. It was that near a thing, this summer, brother, and whether or not you compass it with your philosophy, those selfsame women with their little charms likewise prayed with you, along with the incense that went up from Amefin shrines of every sect, while the Quinaltine sat ignorant on its hill in Guelessar and knew nothing of the threat until it was banished. You were a hero among the rest, brother, along with those who took up arms; you kept the candles lit and raised up prayers in this province against the danger we all faced. Stand with us. Let us have no quibbles of old women and charms in the marketplace, when your temporal lord could well use your prayers.”

“His Grace is Sihhë,” the patriarch said in a faint voice, as if that argued all; and perhaps it did: Tristen heard, and knew that, Prince Efanor’s little book availing what it could, this man had set him on the side which that little book called evil.

“I shall never,” Tristen said, “work any sorcery, sir. And these women are not our enemy,” he added, to have that clear. “I read your book of devotions. His Highness gave it to me. Doesn’t it say that the gods made all the world and the rain and the mountains? So surely they made Sihhë, too.”

He had hoped to turn the patriarch’s sure conviction at least to some doubt; and saw that he had had effect, at least that the patriarch seemed taken aback. So did Emuin, which warned him that it might not be the effect he had hoped.

“His Grace will attend the matter,” Emuin said. “I assure you no sorcery will have effect in this town, nor anywhere His Grace can find it. He may be Sihhë: that remains unproven; he is certainly Mauryl Gestaurien’s successor, legitimate and a friend to the realm, and will not permit harm to the souls or substance of honest folk.”

“These things bring no good fortune,” the Quinalt father said. “His Grace can have little sympathy in such practice, himself, but for the sake of the common folk of this town who have no commerce with wizards and who petition me with prayers for the safety of their souls, I beg you ask His Grace, since you have influence with him, to honor His Majesty’s well-thought and reasonable laws and forbid the display of such symbols.”

“Difficult, since the ducal arms contain them, at His Majesty’s gift.”

The patriarch drew in a breath. “Within the religious context, sir!”

“No common coin will damn any of your flock, father, nor lead any astray to Bryalt beliefs except they be Bryaltine from the cradle, which Your Reverence must admit is tolerably common in Amefel.”

“I beg you take this seriously,” the Quinalt father said. “And lead His Grace at least as strait and seemly a path as may be.”

“His Grace has all manner of favor in His Majesty’s eyes, and the approval of the Holy Father in Guelemara, who blessed him at his oath-giving, and commended him to Your Reverence’s hands in all good faith. I will tell you, brother, for fair judgment and care of your flock’s rights and dues, and for keeping the less savory influences… wizardous and sorcerous alike… from out of the dangerous marches westward, you should be grateful to him. There’s none of the haunts and unhallowed goings-on as might find opportunity here, considering the very injudicious activities of Her now deposed Grace Orien Aswydd.”

“We have never countenanced Her Grace’s doings.”

“Well enough, since she let the very fiend into the apartment His Grace has now warded beyond any opportunity for such maleficent spirits. I’ve tested his wards, and they are subtle and wonderfully made… should you wish to know?”

“I do not!” It was strange to stand to the side and hear himself discussed and argued about. But now the Quinalt father looked at him with a wide and distraught stare, and matters had gone askew from what was prudent, and at Emuin’s hands, none other.

“Sir,” Tristen said with a nod and a will to placate this distressed man, “if I have done anything amiss, I will always hear you, and tell me, tell me if I do wrong. I don’t think Cefwyn ever feared the women in the marketplace, and I know there’s no sorcery that I can feel. But if you have misgivings, I’ll certainly walk there myself and see if there’s any cause for alarm.”

“Your Grace. In your gifts, in your observance of protocols, I find no fault. But I doubt Your Grace will take alarm in such small matters as frighten my flock.”

That last was pointed and sharp-edged: he was not so naïve as to miss it. “His Highness instructed me and gave me a book of devotions. He said it was good I read it, and find the gods, and avoid evil. I agree. I by all means wish to avoid evil.” He had asked himself why the priest came to him now about the market just when the market and the grandmothers had entered his concern, and if it was not magic that made the connection, it was Men. “There was a boy, wasn’t there, Your Reverence?”

“A boy.”

“It was mischief for Paisi to steal a soldier’s kit, but it was greater mischief for that man to come to you and suggest there was something amiss in the market, when the truth was that he wished someone to die for the theft, when it wasn’t even his kit, as I understand: it belonged to a man of the Dragon Guard.”

“I know nothing of any of this, Your Grace!”

“Didn’t a soldier come to you?”

“He by no means told me about any boy.”

“I doubt he did. But you should ask him what the truth is.”

“Your Grace,” the patriarch said, as if he had taken a dismissal in that, his case in disarray and his words turned back on him. But the patriarch blessed himself with a gesture, as Uwen would when he saw wizardry or magic. Clearly the patriarch wished to leave, and Tristen wished just as strongly that this priest would go away. “I shall ask, Your Grace.”

And with a bow and a murmured courtesy, the man edged toward the door until, with a second bow, he was out it.

“Uwen,” Tristen said.

“M’lord.”

“I’ll speak to that soldier. The sergeant.”

“Aye, m’lord.”

“I could almost tell you the man’s name,” Emuin said. “And you’re quite right, young lord: it wasn’t piety that moved His Reverence. Well guessed, and I guess exactly as you do, with small wizardry about it—but I fear His Reverence believes you just worked sorcery and stole it out of his thoughts. You’ve frightened that man. And you’ll frighten the man you bring in to question, never doubt it.”

“I guessed, sir. It was not by magic.”

“Damned for the one time it wasn’t,” Emuin said. “But in the Guelen garrison, there’s a captain who doesn’t want to be in this town or in this province. He followed Parsynan’s orders and had them overthrown, and hasn’t been happy since, if you want my further guess. And that sergeant and no few of his men think like him. I may live in my tower, but I’m not deaf to what goes on in the yard.”

“I wish the patriarch were in Guelessar,” Tristen said, “if I could choose. But the soldiers in the garrison wouldn’t be happy without him. I wish I might send the sergeant and all those men back to Guelessar, but he’d be at Ryssand’s ear, do I understand how he would act? I think I do.”

“I fear ye understand very well,” Uwen said, “an’ master Emuin’s right, too. I’d have set that sergeant to the watch on the bridges, an’ let the troublemaker tell ’is notions to them as has no way to send back to Ryssand, but soldiers is in a surly enough state in winter, wi’ nothin’ to do but pass rumor, as is. There’d be toads rainin’ from heaven in the rumors they’d have about ye, m’lord, an’ wi’ the captain of the Guelens, too, who, by me, ain’t any better. I’ve tried to reason wi’ this man, and I know this sergeant. I wisht I’d found a place to set this fellow where he couldn’t find mischief. I’m sorry it got to His Reverence.”

“I wish I might send all the men home.”

“An’ defend the land wi’ Ivanim?” Uwen asked.

“That is the choice,” he said. They equally well knew the choices he did have. The Amefin villages would have a hard winter, a harder spring and famine in the fall if he mustered the men to winter camp. For half a century the king’s law had allowed no establishment of men-at-arms in Amefel, entrusting the defense of the province to the Aswyddim’s personal guard, and to a garrison of Guelen Guard, of the four Guelen companies the roughest and commonest. Now at urgent need and with the Aswydd guard fled across the river or back to their local lords for fear of Cefwyn’s justice, Amefel had no men of its own but an irregularly armed peasant muster that belonged to the earls, and them needing to do their planting and lambing at the time the army would be engaged across the river.

Therefore, among other reasons, he had retained the Guelen Guard. But now he had evidence of Guelen disaffection, not an unreasonable discontent: the weather had turned, they were held here against expectation and in disgrace from their service with Parsynan, and now faced with the rise of Amefin to positions of authority, when it was Amefin they had once held in check as Parsynan’s iron fist. They were not the guard he would have chosen. Was he at fault? Might another lord have managed better than he had done?

Certainly Parsynan had not improved these men; and Uwen had pleaded for them, saying only a better lord could redeem them. They were Uwen’s old company; and they, Uwen argued, had been misused and misled.

“I will speak to their captain,” he concluded. “Privately.”

“You should do so,” Emuin said, “privately. But you see the seed of discontent in these men, young lord, and it comes of slighting them.”

“My slighting them?”

“And no few of the lords and burgesses. Where might they learn anything of your intent except from rumor? Become approachable. Hold audience. Do more in public.”

“I speak with a half a score of them every time I venture the hall.” He had rarely failed to answer chance questions, and on this he was very sure he was on firm ground. “I speak to soldiers and to workmen and servants in the kitchen. All these folk, as well as to the lords. I answer their questions.”

“Yet make all decisions in chambers. Therein you are at fault. You asked advice: now I advise you.”

“I’ve called the earls for supper.”

“Hold audience beforehand and hold it today. This is where you fail. The people believe in you while the sun shines and they have enough to eat; but when things go harder, they have to know their lord to follow him. Worship is not enough, young lord. Care for their concerns. Care for their fears. Hear the quieter voices. We have His Reverence on our doorstep with rumors and accusations; but what more should you hear? You must sit a certain time every day in the great hall, no more of this dealing in the hallways of the Zeide and granting this and granting that to the loudest and most importunate. You’ll miss the quiet and the desperate. Yes, ride out to the villages, and hear them as well. And don’t neglect Henas’amef and your own court.”

“His Grace already don’t sleep enough,” Uwen said. “Where’s he to rest?”

“And you, Uwen Lewen’s-son, you have your own fault in this! You are not Lord Tristen’s body servant or his guard… you are his captain. Give me no excuses: take command of the Guard, march them up and down until they have no breath for gossip.”

“Uwen does very well,” Tristen said.

“Well is not good enough. And you, young lord, must be approachable for your people other than in the hallways, or prepare to do the business of the province there, on every chance approach and by all comers. You should never have been summoned by His Reverence to come down to hall, as if you were some truant lad with a lesson to read. I find it outrageous in him, and I find you far too accommodating of approach on the one hand and far too secret and unapproachable on the other. What you will tell to the earls separately, tell to them all in common council. Hear debates, once and together, not once for each man. Sit in state, and let petitioners see how their business weighs against other appeals to Your Grace’s resources. If the matters they bring are trivial, they may take shame of it and ask less. Two problems may be each other’s answer. And I will tell you Cefwyn could benefit by that advice. He cannot rule from his chambers. Indeed he cannot. He avoids the likes of Ryssand by shutting himself in chambers, but he fails to hear the town reeve, and this with a war in the offing. He is the worst example.”

“Have you told him so?”

“I told his father, who had the same fault: oh, deal with every man in private, tell one man one thing, another the other, and thus Lord Mistrust rules all! Idrys, the most furtive man alive, Idrys concurs with me in this.

Ylesuin cannot have the ghost of the last king presiding over it, no more than Amefel can have Suspicion for a duke and Rumor for leader of its armies. You have His Reverence listening to sergeants of the Guard and soldiers whispering with the gate-guard, and gods alone know what tales they obtain from the kitchens. But fault none of them until you demand and they refuse. Captain Anwyll and his command left yesterday to sit and endure the snow on the river… good riddance, say I. Anwyll will never say good morning but he asks permission for it of someone. Of him I expect nothing but good compliance; but you, Uwen Lewen’s-son, you’ve waited last night and all morning long and not seized the Guelens and shaken them into order. Seize command!”

“Aye, sir.”

“And, young lord, duke of Amefel, until you assemble your court and rule it with a firm hand, I look for you to be a profound concern to your captain, who knows your kind civility with fools. Lordship does not bind you to give away the treasury or to consent to every request. I saw hope in Lewen’s-son last night; I see it today. What of you?”

“Is that why now you advise me, when since summer Cefwyn and I alike have asked and asked and gotten nothing? Can you fault me, sir, when of your advice I’ve had precious little come down from the tower? You say I should leave my chambers and sit in hall. Cannot you come down and stand by me?”

That drew a tilt of Emuin’s head and a wary look. “I advise as I see to advise. Now I see a stirring of will, young lord, in you and in your honest captain. Employ it.”

“I have the earls’ goodwill. The Guelen Guard is a harder matter.”

“Parsynan appointed their officers, m’lord,” Uwen said, “an’ master Emuin’s right, best we can do to keep ’em out of mischief is march ’em up an’ down. Ye daren’t send a man of ’em home: they’d be straight to Parsynan wi’ gods know what tale. If ye wisht my soldierly opinion, it’s the captain an’ the seniormost sergeant is the poison in the cup, him in the hall last night. Gellyn’s the sergeant’s name. I suspect he was the one went to the patriarch: and maybe ye can put the fear in the sergeant, but small hope for the captain, say I, who’s a Quinalt man, an’ a hard-nosed Quinalt at that. ’E won’t change, an’ it ain’t right you talk to ’im before me. You want the men that leapt right quick to Parsynan’s order to slaughter the prisoners, m’lord, it was this captain an’ this sergeant, an’ the rest was swept along wi’ what they had no heart for, otherwise.”

Emuin had come forward with advice, and now Uwen was stirred to report to him, when before he had been swathed in silence.

And it was no shocking news, what Uwen said about difficulties with the Guelen officers: he had heard it before in bits and pieces. But now Anwyll was out of the town, and his learned and lettered Guelen efficiency was neither a restraint on the Guard officers of the garrison nor on Uwen’s command of them. He had worked for a fortnight to have Anwyll out the gates; and lo! now all the stones that had refused to move tumbled at once.

“I do hear,” he said, “and I’ll take your advice, yours and master Emuin’s. I’ll have Tassand teach Paisi how to beg the soldier’s pardon, for the soldiers’ sake, so they understand and he understands. He mustn’t do it again.”

“That comforts me,” Emuin said. “By this afternoon, do you say, Tassand is to have wrought this miracle?”

“I take your advice, sir,” he said, for it seemed to him a little salve for the soldiers’ pride and for grudges might mend something of what was amiss with the Guelen Guard: a better lord, Uwen had said the night of the slaughter, might let these men regain their honor.

But gaining what he had of advice, and being told to establish a court, he pressed further on forbidden ground, this time with Emuin. “What of Auld Syes, then, sir, if advice is possible today?” He abandoned fear of asking or saying anything at all before Uwen, or even Lusin. “Have you advice on that, sir, and what when one of the earls asks me who she was or signifying what? I know the men have spread it about. And what do you think I should do about the sergeant?”

“Advice? Advice now, when you’ve gone out and stirred up the spirits of this land? Gods save us, say I, gods save us all. Discipline your sergeant or march him and his captain out to join Anwyll; set up a second camp with the discontents and leave Uwen sole captain here.”

“Can they?”

“Can they what?”

“Can the gods save us? I’ve found nothing in Efanor’s book to say so.”

“Oh, young lord,” Emuin said with a sober look and a shake of his head, “that is not the question. Certainly not in this matter. Set things in order. That’s what you’re here to do. Set all things in order that Parsynan and Cuthan disordered. All you know should tell you the danger in disorder. And with that, I’m back to my tower and my shuttered and warded windows, young lord. I’ve said enough. Order is what’s needed. Order is the only saving of us. I pray you, establish one soon, any sort of order you like, so long as it’s no one else’s order.”

Something in that, touching on what they both understood, breathed a cold breath out of the gray space.

“Do you see sorcery, sir? Or have you seen it?”

Emuin turned again and looked at him, but it was in the gray space that answer came to him, not aloud.

—Does it not always seek the crack in the wall, young lord?

So ruin had begun at Ynefel, subtly, an old, familiar crack beneath his own small window; and from that small fracture of the stone, grown greater, all calamity came. He could not but remember it, for the thunderclap that had riven the Quinalt roof could have shaken him no worse than did Emuin with that one word.

Yes, the Zeide’s heart had many cracks, of every sort, not least the bloody rift between Meiden and the Guelen Guard.

Now the Quinalt, at a Guard sergeant’s instigation, came lodging complaints aimed at Amefin.

“No more dare I say,” Emuin proclaimed, and began to go his way.

Emuin denied him again, again stopped short of the whole truth; or perhaps it was all the truth Emuin had now to give him.

Uwen gave a twitch of his shoulders and a shake of his head, and began to say something. But all the light had gone to brass, and the gray space was all but with them.

He could reach out and have Emuin’s attention from here. He asked himself what he would say when he did, what authority he would seize unto himself, and do what with it?

Invade Elwynor? He had Cefwyn’s authority to raise an army unprecedented in the dealings of Ylesuin with Amefel; but Crissand pleaded the summer war had left the province bereft as was. Yet Cevulirn happened to come to him.

Who has done this? he asked the unresponsive void, and the old man who was by now walking back to his tower, with feeble and arthritic steps.

—Who has done this, Emuin? Have you called Ivanor to me?

“Wizards is pricklish folk at best,” Uwen was saying, in the world of substance and color and the smell of candles, cold stone, and the incense that lingered where the Quinalt had been. “I’ll find the boy an’ I’ll find the one who talked to the priests, as ye say, m’lord. Master Emuin’s entirely right to chide me: busy soldiers is better soldiers, an’ the sergeant and the captain’s better shoveling snow in the river camp. Ye’ve given ’em fair trial since they went again’ your given word; an’ if they’ve been behind your back a second time, don’t gi’ ’em a third chance. The river’s the place for ’em, an’ a warnin’ to Captain Anwyll to go with ’em.”

“What orders you see fit. At any time you see fit.” Yet it seemed unfair to him, to damn a man unheard. “But before that, I’ll hear the sergeant’s reasons, and if I have no good answer from him, then send them all to Anwyll’s camp.”

“’At’s just,” Uwen agreed. “I’ll bring ’im, sayin’ ye want to have a word wi’ ’im. And I’d ask did his captain approve what he did, m’lord, that I would, but I suspect I’d already know the answer. The poison there ain’t all the sergeant. The sergeant wouldn’t be what he is, ’cept for the captain.”

“I trust your advice,” he said. “Bid the sergeant come to my chambers, and after him, the captain, in private. And send to the earls. Say I’ll hold court today.”

Such was the plan; and so the sergeant was due to come at midafternoon, and the captain of the garrison directly after him, but by somewhat past the expected time, Uwen came to his apartment to say personally that there was no sight nor report of either man.

“It ain’t ordinary the captain should be unfind-able,” Uwen said, “and right now I’m inquirin’ in the lower stables.”

“As if they should have fled?”

“Or should be attendin’ of their horses or pretendin’ so,” Uwen said. “It’s the only thing a soldier’s got need of, wi’out orders to be out an’ away from the garrison. If they ain’t drinkin’ or about the town… an’ if they ain’t at the stables, there’s the whole damn town to search.”

“Inquire,” he said. The gray space might have told him something, if he had well known the men they were searching for. Ranging through the whole population of the town and finding soldiers was like searching for certain kinds of pebbles in a pile of them… it would mean sorting a good many other pebbles in the process, disturbing them and discovering more of their privacy and peace than seemed just, and taking time, that, too.

“Do you have the Guard searching for them?” he asked.

“I ain’t ask’t it, let alone ordered. It’s their officers, m’lord. I’m inquirin’ by way o’ the Amefin guard an’ the staff. An’ talkin’ to the undersergeants, the while, just getting the look o’ men I used to know, m’lord, an’ I do know some of ’em.”

“But not all?”

“The Guelen Guard comes from more ’n Guelessar, m’lord. Panys, Murandys. Murandys’ province. Any second and third son, as ain’t apt to inherit, that man’s apt to come to the standing companies. The lords’ kin’ll go to the Dragons or the Prince’s Guard, but the common lads… an’ them as ain’t quite lads, like me… they’re for the Guelen Guard. An’, aye, some of these I marched to Amefel with; an’ some I knew when His Majesty was here; an’ some I knew for scoundrels, too, the senior sergeant bein’ no better.”

“But some you don’t know?”

“A good many’s come in since summer’s end, when His Majesty marched home to Guelessar an’ Parsynan came in. Some are good men an’ one an’ the other I’ve me doubts of. All’s Quinalt, but some’s too Quinalt, if ye take my meanin’, m’lord, an’ don’t like Amefin.”

“Set the garrison in order,” he said. “Marching them to the river’s not all the answer. Have the captain and the highest sergeant gone off and left no one word where they are? Or are men not telling?”

“Seems, m’lord, they left no instructions of who is in command, ’cept as there’s seniority. The man who’s second senior, he ain’t informed where they are, an’ I think I believe ’im. An’ Your Grace is right: it ain’t the way it ought to be.”

“Did Anwyll allow such things?”

“Captain Anwyll didn’t interfere much.”

“You command the garrison,” Tristen said. “And all the Zeide. Set them in order.”

“Them’s His Majesty’s troops,” Uwen said distressedly. “I can’t just dismiss His Majesty’s officers, m’lord. I ha’nt the authority, wi’ all goodwill. I begun in the Guelens and came to the Dragons, unlikely as ever was; and then I could ha’ ordered ’em: a Dragon sergeant can order a captain of the common companies. But I left the Dragons an’ come wi’ you, m’lord, which means I’m provincial an’ not a king’s man anymore. An’ if them troops hadn’t got a captain, I could, if you ordered, in your province. But not so long’s there’s a king’s captain in charge. Anwyll could have ordered ’em. But ye sent him to the border.”

That His Majesty’s troops did as they pleased and did wrong to Amefin folk within a stone’s cast of the Zeide was not tolerable to him; in his mind the captain had forfeited his command the night he had obeyed Parsynan’s word against his. When he and the senior sergeant disappeared at the same time, leaving no orders behind them he knew what to call it: irresponsibility was a Word he had learned in one place and another. Treason, he had learned very well, here in Amefel.

And with the town’s well-being and Amefin justice resting on the garrison’s proper conduct, Anger rushed up, twice in two days, now.

Uncommon, he thought. And that, the anger, he carefully lifted out of its place to examine later, in some quietness of heart. To have anger give the next orders was unwise, even if it was just.

—Do you hear? he asked Emuin, across the insulating weight of stone. Do you know that the captain and the sergeant have disappeared, and do you count it coincidence, good sir? Shall I be angry about it?

There was no answer, as he had in his heart expected none. Oh, Emuin heard. Unquestionably he heard. Emuin was settling into his chamber, poking up the fire, which had gone to embers, and gave him attention, but no answer.

He had, he recalled, said to the patriarch himself that he guessed the source of the advisement about the trinket-sellers.

And was it unreasonable that the patriarch should have sent word to the sergeant, who might have told his captain? He himself had had little dealing with either man, and it was still the matter of a search after pebbles among pebbles; but he began to suspect that the pebbles in question were no longer in this heap.

“Perhaps they’ve taken horses,” he said to Uwen, who waited quietly for his answer, “and then you would have authority.”

“I am askin’ that,” Uwen said, “an’ word ain’t come yet.”

“Only from the bottom of the hill?”

“There’s a lot of shiftin’ about, especially wi’ the Ivanim in wi’ sixty-odd horses an’ them needin’ room; master Haman’s got lads movin’ horses out to the far meadows and makin’ winter shelter. It’s over an hour’s ride out an’ back to some of them places, an’ till we’ve counted, an’ horses tendin’ to wander off in copses an’ stream cuts for windbreaks, even when ye built ’em a fair shelter…”

“We won’t know by evening,” he said, “unless the captain turns up before that.”

“I asked the gate-guards, too. An’ they just ain’t sure whether the men is in or out. They don’t much notice the soldiers comin’ and goin’. I put it to ’em they should notice such things an’ look sharper. They are under my command, and I apologize for that, m’lord.”

If the captain had taken horse and gone, there was no question where he had gone: to Guelessar, to Parsynan, to unfriendly ears.

“We won’t know, then, until we hear from Haman,” Tristen said. “And the lords are coming, within the hour?”

“Aye, m’lord. Word’s passed.”

He had been remiss in letter-writing. Idrys had bidden him write often, very often; and now in Uwen’s report he thought he should write that days-delayed letter.

“Go do what you can do,” he said, “but be back when I go down to the hall.”

“Aye, m’lord.”

So Uwen went off to find those he was now sure were unavailable and well away, and Tristen sat down at the desk with dragon legs and under the brazen loom of dragon jaws, and took up pen to warn Idrys directly of all that had happened. He was all too aware now that along with the Dragons he had dismissed all his most reliable Guelen messengers, except his private guard. The Amefin guard would not be able to traverse Guelessar unquestioned or unremarked, and might not so easily reach Idrys. He had retained not a one of the Dragons at hand; and under the circumstances, trusting the Guelens to report ill of their own officers seemed folly. There was Gedd. He might well send Gedd.

Uwen, however, might well find an honest man or two in the unit of which he had been a part as late as midsummer. Not all of them had marched home, of those who had fought at Lewenbrook; and, Cevulirn’s help notwithstanding, he could not afford to dismiss the Guelen Guard. Honest men must be the heart of what he should have done by now and must now urgently do with the Guelens: depose or assign elsewhere officers who had carried out the massacre. Now that the sergeant and the captain had fled, if that was indeed their course, then all the harm their reports could do would have been done… and he was increasingly convinced that they had fled, and that the Quinalt had warned them.

Overtake the fugitive officers on the road, frighten the horses from under them… that he might do, as he had done to Parsynan.

But it had not prevented Parsynan getting to Guelessar, as he was well sure Parsynan had done; and he found himself more than reluctant to invade the gray space with such a reckless assault.

And when he realized that in himself, he let the pen pause, asking himself why he did hesitate.

Fear of killing: there was that. There was no guarantee how they would fall, and a fall was chance and chance was the realm of wizards.

There was no guarantee such an act would in any wise prevent the gossip arriving at a bad time; when it arrived was now a matter of a horse’s strength, reasonably certain. But to bring it into the realm of chance also laid things as open as a window flung wide to whatever influences might be seething just out of reach of his inquiries.

There was Ivanor… arrived the very day he sent the Dragons to the border.

And arrived on the heels of portents and omens, word of lords and aethelings, himself and Crissand and prophecy.

Now Paisi, a waif detestable to the Guelens and sheltered by the Amefin gate-guard, had become the cause of upheaval in the Guelen Guard, the garrison that was Amefel’s surest and readiest defense.

His hand trembled somewhat as he dipped the quill in ink. The thoughts that came to him were not quiet ones, nor assured in their direction. Emuin’s sudden spate of advice to him and to Uwen assumed the character of a milestone reached, a point at which Emuin would speak; and now, now he was aware of Emuin’s eavesdropping.

—You know, he said to Emuin, and had nothing but Emuin’s retreating presence, refusing to utter a thing.

Anger came back, a blinding anger, and he smothered it, quickly, as some foreign and hostile thing.

To find Emuin standing at distance, watching him.

Watching, saying nothing, power intact.

Emuin could still keep secrets from him.

Had not Emuin always said he would not stand in the path of his intentions? Yet Emuin did exactly that, refusing his demands, keeping him from leaping from one stepping-stone of advice to the next, distracting him… leading him, by his frustrated questions, to examine things for himself, letting things Unfold to him. And leading him yet again, by his affection, by his anger, by his very conviction that Emuin held secrets from him…

While he had no answers from Emuin… he delayed acting. While he delayed acting…

He found other courses to take.

The anger subsided, grew cool. Master Emuin still said not a word to him, but he stood in the winds of the gray space and detected a certain small satisfaction wafting on the winds.

—Is that your tactic, sir?

Emuin did not ignore him, rather watched him warily, and he ignored Emuin, mostly, at least, aware that time was short and the earls would be gathering.

He wrote, in the time he had. And paused, the feather brushing his lips, and gazed at the candleflame, recalling how, in the mysterious ways of wizards, once at Mauryl’s hearth he had been allured by fire. His hand still bore that small scar. He never forgot that he could not grasp the flame, only feed it or extinguish it.

Such was wizardry. Such had been Mauryl.

Such was Emuin, uncatchable, even by such a power as he had in himself. If his power was the wind and the whirlwind, Emuin’s, like Mauryl’s, was the fire, small as a spark, leaping up to consume whole houses, and moving aside from a curious finger.

And had not Mauryl been very like that? Mauryl, whose half-burned letters still contained only requests for supply and observations on the weather? A murderer had thought to find far more in Mauryl’s writings, and yet… what could they learn of Mauryl or any wizard in the small exchanges? It was the long work that said more, the persistence of the little spark smoldering outside its hearth, the one, slight, unnoticed act of chance.

—I respect you, he said to one he was sure had his ears well stopped and his heart warded. I respect your working, sir, nor am such a fool as to ignore it. When I transgress, you will not tell me; but should I transgress against you, sir, I beg you continue to call me a fool. I fear the silence more than the shadows.

I will to do good, sir. But we are, are we not, something different one from the other? If I am the wind, you are the fire, and may burn, but mine is the stronger force.

I am Sihhë. Is that the lesson I am finally to learn, that I am not a Man and that I should not practice wizardry?

If that’s so, sir, it would seem I need you. I need you very much.

The captain of the Guelens has very likely fled, and mischief will come of it, and wizardry might prevent him.

But do you say I should not wield it? That magic is my skill, and I should avoid wizardry?

He listened until the ink dried on the quill tip, and he heard no answer, none, at least, in words.

But there was a sense of presence grown more peaceful, a touch softer than the feather and more subtle than a word. The dragons that loomed over this place threatened that peace: creatures of fire, reared in angry postures.

Yet was the carving oak, or horse?

Was the image bronze, or all that a dragon might be?

The nearest of them loomed, a spell in its own right, and warred against the peace. It leered across his shoulder, flanked him, stared outward with him, with its bronze and dreadful countenance, an Aswydd beast, witness of all that had happened here… and trying, so it seemed, to be his ally.

Do I command the dragons? he asked that silent, wizardly witness, with none but an afterthought to the king’s men who bore that name, or to the arms of the Marhanen, the golden dragon on the red field, which was the emblem of the kingdom as well. His immediate question was to what extent he could reach back into Aswydd power, and rely on it; but in the way of such questions, it answered itself differently.

The echo of understanding the question raised in him was that the Aswydd dragons extended their reach into Guelessar, and that they backed the Marhanen throne, not Sihhë emblems… never the Sihhë emblems. The dragons were solely the emblems of Men and kings and lords of Men. This room he had never felt he owned. This room he had warded by his presence, as much as lived in it. It was useful to everyone’s safety that he lived here and kept the wards.

Yet it came to him, yes, he did command the dragons, now, and only so long as these creatures of fire and passion failed to rouse his anger, or his passion, or his fear. That long, and only so long, did he command them, and only that long did he command those who were their masters.

The dragons and those who commanded them must not break that condition. They must never break it. With wind and fire alike they could deal, but never break that condition. He was writing a message to the Lord Commander, with the local garrison in disarray; he was facing a meeting of the lords of Amefel, to sit and do justice, and the dragons loomed above, reminding him their anger was fire, and his will was wind.

He felt that silent and wizardly witness to his musings, sealed as he was, and deliberately withdrawn from the soundless sound in the silence that lapped about this room of his refuge. This, too, Emuin witnessed.

The quill when he dipped it and wrote scratched like claws on stone, as if the dragons stirred on their perches. Shadows, the tame ones that had a right here, lurked and crept under tables and in the folds of green drapery, within cabinets and in corners as he shaped his report.

He owned magic as his birthright. Having it, he knew he must be careful of it. He never loosed the shadows that belonged here, never, in fact, allowed the lights to be extinguished: candles always burned here, and he never shut the drapes by day. The ones who had died in this room were not wholly his men; but they were faithful to Amefel, and he willingly lived under their witness, conscious of their leanings, and sure now, as in Auld Syes’ salutation to him and Crissand, that he held what would not forever be his.

Emuin heard that, too, and tried very quietly to slip away. But Emuin could not elude him now: often as Emuin might have watched, unseen, mistrustful of him before this, he was not unseen now, and might never be again.

—Know that, Tristen said, wounded, and know I have heard at least one and two of your lessons, master Emuin. And because I have heard, I’m about to hear the demands of stonemasons and of the earls. I wish the Guelens and the house of Meiden will not go at each other’s throats.

Why, why, master Emuin, do wicked purposes seem to slide by so easily, and these men escape me to do mischief and Mauryl’s letters burn, and reasons for all this wickedness slip through my fingers? Is this the way of things in the world? Or is there cause aside from me and you?

Is that the reason of your mistrust?

And is that mistrust of me the reason you came here, after all?

Chapter 7

There was no miraculous word of the fugitives by the hour the court convened… and that was not to Tristen’s surprise or Uwen’s. The readiness with which the court assembled did somewhat surprise Tristen: the summons had gone out to the earls to come early and present their petitions, such as they had, before the banquet… a feast which had already been planned for their guest for the evening, and on which Cook had labored since yesterday evening, to a mighty shouting and commotion around the kitchens. That event Tristen expected would see no tardiness.

But the earls all came, every one, even earlier than the requested hour; and so Cevulirn attended the audience of his neighbor province, dressed in his plain, serviceable gray and white, yet no lord in the hall was more dignified by his finery than Cevulirn by his demeanor. He drew every eye by his mere presence in hall, and stood at the side of the steps of the dais to give his account of doings at the court, the marriage of His Majesty and Her Grace, and the death of Brugan, son of Corswyndam, Lord Ryssand. There was no restlessness at all in his hearers, and all hung on the account of a man who doled words out like coin, well weighed and sparingly.

“What shall we do?” Drumman was quick to ask, when he had heard Cevulirn’s account of his dismissal from the king’s court. “This is an attack on the south and on all of us, our privileges, our rights, soon enough our land. We have in king Cefwyn a monarch who at least respects our soil and look how these damned northerners deal with him!”

“Aye,” said no few, from among the ealdormen of the town, too, for Cefwyn had ruled Ylesuin from Henas’amef for some few weeks.

“Let ’im favor us in the least and here’s the barons with their noses out of joint!” someone shouted out of turn. “Earl Drumman has the right of it. We fought wizards and the Elwynim at Lewenbrook, and buried our sons, where we could find ’em, an’ where’s bloody Ryssand?”

“Safe,” said Cevulirn, in a fleeting still moment of the shock of that forwardness. “Safe, sir, and hopeful of comfort and power for himself, which does not come with a marriage to Ninévrisë of Elwynor, who will strengthen Cefwyn Marhanen. You see very clearly. Ryssand is my enemy. I assure you he is the enemy of your lord as well.”

“Lord Sihhë!” someone was bold enough to call out. “Lord Sihhë can teach Ryssand a lesson or two!”

It was not what Tristen wished, this stir about the northern lords, and he saw matters sliding away from his hand in the very first moments of the audience Emuin had advised him to hold. He knew that was not by intent, nor by Cevulirn’s intent, and he lifted his hand from the arm of the chair to seize a breathwide silence.

“I am the king’s friend. All I’ve done is to establish Amefel’s borders, and prevent war from coming here again… which I don’t permit and which I don’t think Cevulirn will permit.”

“We will not permit it,” Cevulirn said staunchly. “But that’s my tale, such as it is, sirs.”

“Long live the lord of Ivanor,” Crissand said, and everyone said the same.

It was a high beginning, the matters of kings and the doings of barons. But it was not all that waited attention: “My lord,” said Tassand, who had a list of things they should see to in the gathering, and brought it to the steps of the dais, “the matter of the Guard, the search after the officers. The dereliction of the command of the garrison: Your Grace’s captain’s come with his report.”

“Are they found?”

Tassand ascended a step to lean close. “The lord captain’s taken the sergeants,” Tassand whispered, while every ear in the hall attempted to overhear. “And has them all an’ some of the soldiers with him, an’ Paisi… all to come in the hall, my lord duke, at your order.”

“Bring them,” he said, reluctant to have all this spread before the earls and the chance carpenter with a request for supply: but so Emuin had advised him he should rule. He settled himself for a lengthy proposal of the case, and the debate of the earls on every point of it, including Paisi’s requisite apology.

But he had not reckoned with Uwen Lewen’s-son, who marched in the soldiers in proper military order, saw them stand smartly to attention, and had Paisi trailing all with a hangdog look and a bundle in his arms. And then he said to himself that by Emuin’s advice he should let his men speak, in public, and do business under everyone’s witness.

“Uwen,” Tristen said. “Captain Uwen. What do you have to report?”

“First is the justice wi’ this lad,” Uwen said, not at all abashed, “m’lord. An’ he’s to give the property back to the man in good order. Jump, boy. Do it!”

“M’lord,” Paisi said in a faint voice, “I can’t. He ain’t here.”

“And where is he?” Uwen asked the foremost of the men.

“At the border,” said that man.

“Then give the kit to him in trust,” Uwen said, “and apologize like a man, on your lord’s order.”

Paisi all but ran to bestow the kit on the Guard officer, and blurt out: “On account of I was wrong, sir, an’ will never be a thief, an’ I beg your pardon, sir, for the captain’s sake and m’lor’s.”

“Given,” came the short response, not entirely in good grace.

“He’ll do duty for a fortnight,” Uwen said, “an’ stand wi’ the guard at night, besides ’is duties in the house. An’ when the Dragons march home again he’ll come an’ get that kit and beg pardon again, an’ lucky I don’t send ’im to the border to carry it.”

“Sir,” the soldier said, in far better humor. There was, as it were, a breath and a shifting in the ranks, even at attention, as if every man had found satisfaction in that.

“Yes, sir,” Paisi said.

“ ’At’s one thing,” Uwen said, and strode along the polished pavings in boots a little short of absolute polish, unlike the lords’, and with his silver hair windblown out of its tie. But in his broad, work-hardened body and use-scarred armor and the brisk sureness in the orders he gave, there was no doubt at all this was a man sure of his authority. “There’s honest men in this company. But, m’lord, the captain an’ the senior sergeant is very likely bound for Guelessar wi’out leave, which is a disgrace an’ a shame to these honest men, especially as they did it only hearin’ ye wisht’ t’ speak to ’em. An’ while it’s true there’s some good men find this a hard duty an’ ain’t happy in Amefel, and some has been forward in sayin’ so, I told ’em on my honor an’ your authority, m’lord, they was free to follow the captain an’ the master sergeant and take their horses an’ all an’ leave wi’ no let nor hindrance nor slight to their honor, on one condition: that they have the face to come here an’ stand on two feet an’ ask leave of the lord of this province like soldiers, not desertin’ like some damn band of brigands. So’s here’s a fair number o’ decent soldiers what ain’t content to be here, an’ if ye’ll grant ’em leave, they’ll go. An’ here’s others as is content and proud o’ this company, an’ will stay. Also, m’lord, here’s a sergeant I served with, Wynned, who’s come to ask leave on a different account, on account of his mother is ailin’, an’ he wants leave to see ’er, an’ he’ll come back soon’s he’s paid his respects an’ seen to her wants.”

“What Uwen says,” Tristen answered quietly, and not without careful looks at the men, “I do agree to, and if you will go, go with whatever supply you need.” The gossip was already sped and the harm was done; and he was glad to know Uwen had sifted the garrison for chaff.

“Your lordship,” one said, “horses and lodging on our way.”

“Horses and lodgin’s is fair,” Uwen said. “Seein’ the weather. Tents an’ the packhorses is needed here.”

“What Uwen says, I support,” Tristen said.

“They stood their part an’ discharged their oath,” Uwen said, “an’ by me they’re free to go.”

“Go, then,” Tristen said, “and bear my goodwill to the Lord Commander. I wish you good weather.— And, Wynedd, I wish your mother well.”

“Your Grace,” the man named Wynedd said, blushing bright red, and Tristen thought to himself that in Wynedd Uwen might have found his messenger.

“They’ll be on their way in the hour,” Uwen said. “Face! An’ turn! An’ bear yoursel’s like soldiers, no farewells in the taverns!—Lewes!”

“Sir.” One man stood fast as the others left, and Uwen waved him forward.

“This here’s Corporal Lewes, who’s a likely man, and who I’d set in a sergeant’s place, among this list here. Lewes is Wynedd’s corporal; an’ I’ll name others, by your leave, m’lord.”

“As you see fit,” Tristen said. He was amazed. Uwen, so shy and soft-spoken with him and within lords’ gatherings was something else entirely in the field; and, it turned out, in a gathering of soldiers. He did recall that when Idrys had dealt with the Guard in Cefwyn’s court he had not quite summoned such a large troop of them, but he had seen very, little of court: he found the entire matter of the Guard dealt with and disposed of in far shorter a time than seemed the rule of things in council. His newly assembled earls looked with wonder at this public exchange and the trading of appointments in the garrison.

But had not Emuin said to proceed in public? There was good reason the province should know the quality of the men who kept order in the town, and no one looked displeased to witness the departure of the disaffected men; and not displeased at Wynedd’s reasons or Lewes’ recommendation, either, or with Uwen’s handling of matters. There had been talk behind hands, but more for politeness and quiet, it seemed, than hostility.

“’At’s my report, m’lord,” Uwen said in conclusion, as the noise of soldiers faded in the hall.

“Well-done,” Tristen said, and looked to the rest of Tassand’s list, which proved thereafter the small business of petitions, the sort that had overtaken him in the hall, and requests, one for a marriage of a ducal ward.

“Am I in charge of this person?” he asked, and truth, as Lord Azant explained, the ducal ward was a relative of Lord Cuthan, a young girl, as Tassand knew and interjected, left behind in Cuthan’s flight. Merilys was her name, and she was twelve years old.

“Twelve,” he said. Ages of Men eluded him, but this seemed young. “A child.”

“Indeed, my lord,” said another, elder man. “In need of guidance and direction, and protection of the estate she can in no wise manage.”

“And you, sir?”

“Thane of Ausey, Your Grace. Dueradd, thane of Ausey, betrothed to the lady in question.”

“My lord,” Earl Azant said, edging forward. “I stand remote kin to the child. In the absence of the earl, and his dispossession, all obligations of kinship are fallen on Your Grace. The marriage—”

“The marriage is contracted by the lady of Idas’aren,” said the groom, “and agreed and sealed by the earl of Bryn, as m’lord can see if he will be so kind…”

“All agreements by the earl are abrogated,” Azant said, “and this marriage is not in the girl’s interest.”

“Not all the earl’s agreements are abrogated. His market agreements are being honored…”

“The lady of Idas’aren is not a heifer at market, and her mother, my cousin, is against this union!”

“What does the lady of Idas’aren say?” Tristen asked, lost in the back-and-forth of rights and arguments.

“My lord, she’s too young to know her advantage.”

“Then until she’s old enough to know her advantage…” Tristen said. He found all sympathy for a young soul tossed and bartered about without her understanding or her consent. He had no idea of marriages. But he did, of being set about and ordered here and there. “… may I have the marriage wait?”

There was a murmur, and Tassand, a mere servant in Guelessar, and now in charge of the household, said quietly: “I’m sure Your Grace can do whatever Your Grace pleases.”

“Then I say let the marriage wait until she’s older and can say what she wishes.”

Azant made a small ha! of triumph, and the thane of Ausey retreated with a mutter of angry protest, drowned in the murmur of the hall. No one else looked unhappy, and no few looked well satisfied.

Meanwhile Tassand read out the next matter, stone for repair near the gate, “… requiring,” Tassand said, “only Your Grace’s word to pay the workmen, which seems justified here.”

“I give it,” he said, as he had agreed to a hundred such requests.

Had he done justice to the young girl? He felt a motion of his heart and he did as seemed right to him. He assented to what for some reason needed his assent. The other matters were as mundane as the request for payment… a request of the town clerks for Zeide records, and that, he knew was impossible.

“They’re likely lost,” he said, and saw the Guelen-born clerk who had come with him from the capital come forward, just to the edge of the gathering. “Are they not?”

The clerk gave a little bow. “M’lord, there’s progress, but I beg to say, no, my lord, we still can’t provide all the records. It’s property and inheritance the magistrates want, and it’s all a muddle, for reasons Your Grace knows.”

The archives had been kept in disorder, or at least the semblance of it, even during Lord Heryn’s life, so no king’s clerk could find proof of Heryn’s doings, that was what Cefwyn had said. Now the disorder was real, for Parsynan had done nothing to set the place in order that he could detect; and the senior archivist who might have kept the whereabouts of important papers and books set in memory was dead, murdered by the younger, who had fled.

“We make lists as quickly as we can,” the clerk said, “but to tell the very truth, Your Grace, two more clerks or even a boy to carry and climb would speed the work; and Your Grace to rule on disputes, supplanting records.”

“Tassand,” Tristen said, out of his own competence.

“I’ll inquire, m’lord,” Tassand said, and he trusted it would come to some good issue, or Tassand would report to him. He had no idea what it cost to pay clerks, but he knew the books, which now were jumbled in towering stacks on tables, exceeding the shelves that existed, needed better care than Heryn had given them: not only inheritance and tax records, but works of philosophy, of history, of poetry, all gathered into one confused pile. There were treasures still in that place, he was convinced of it, and no knowing what Lord Cuthan might have destroyed or taken. As he understood, they had hardly a list of what the king of Ylesuin might have taken… nothing would Cefwyn destroy, no question there. But Cefwyn had certainly taken the tax records, and a history or two.

Cuthan had done the worst.

And wondering about Cuthan’s dealings with the library led to other questions, and the welfare of Cuthan’s people, which, if he had arranged the matters under discussion, would have been the foremost thing to do. But it seemed a discussion more appropriate to the lords alone, not to this hour when burghers from the town and clerks and common soldiers rubbed shoulders.

So when Tassand reported the list of petitioners exhausted and asked whether he would say anything he found nothing in particular to say. Now that he had taken up the broom to sweep difficulties and cobwebs off his doorstep, there was one paving stone missing from a complete and unscarred structure in Amefel: there was one outstanding fault, and he had thought of the man in two problems which had come before him, even in one audience.

Cuthan. Cuthan, Lord of Bryn.

Cuthan, Edwyll’s betrayer.

Cuthan, Crissand’s enemy, who had fled to Tasmôrden.

—«♦«♦»♦»—

Interlude

—«♦«♦»♦»—

In the old scriptorium that served as solar in these cold winter days the consort’s court stitched and gossiped. Lady Luriel was a primary subject of interest; but Ninévrisë said nothing, only attended her small, precise stitches, gathering news of Luriel’s previous and current indiscretions, sure that in her own absence the subject of gossip was herself, and Father Benwyn, and Cefwyn.

Luriel found no mercy with these women. There was some whisper about “His Majesty,” which a matron swiftly hushed; but mostly the ladies buzzed like bees about Panys’ sister Brusanne, a plain, awkward, and myopic girl whose stitching always suffered from untimely knots. Brusanne was not accustomed to being the focus of attention, and said, clearly without thinking, regarding her brother, “His Majesty said he might have Eveny Forest and Aysonel if he married her.”

Every eye turned to Ninévrisë, quick as a lightning stroke, and they were all trapped, looking at one another, exposed and naked, on a point of common dismay.

Then Ninévrisë calmly snipped a thread. “What a nice notion,” she said blithely, feigning ignorance. “She’s been so unhappy. Murandys is a rocky place, is it not? And Panys is full of forests.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Brusanne said, blushing deep red.

“I look forward to her joining us here,” Ninévrisë said. “She’s very well read, so I hear.”

“I think she’s sleeping late,” said the shameless widow of Bonden-on-Wyk, and there was a general stir.

“Madiden!” said the Lady Curalle, thoroughly Guelen, and staunchly virtuous.

“Well, so she may be,” said the widow. “She’ll be wed, never a doubt. That one’s set at marriage and escaping her uncle’s hand, and would not I? Would not you? Small wonder.”

“Well, I’d dance with Murandys himself!” said Byssalys with a wicked look. “Jewels can excuse every fault else, oh, and that man has treasury.”

“His last wife had a lovely funeral,” said the irrepressible widow Madiden.

Perhaps another lady of highest rank might have stilled the unseemly gossip, but Ninévrisë listened, and gathered knowledge, of Murandys, of Panys. It was a court far more tolerable, and more informative, with Lady Artisane in retreat. It informed her, as she listened, that Murandys was indispensable to Cefwyn’s plans, and yet was not a man worth leaning on or relying on. Here was a man whose treatment of three wives was in question, whose management of his tenants was notorious, and she was distressed that Cefwyn tolerated this man… habit, and his father’s policies, all that aside: if she were king of Ylesuin, she would not tolerate him.

But events had not made her a reigning monarch, nor even a reigning queen, and she could not claim that Elwynim nobility was in any regard better. A third of the lords of Elwynor had rejected her claim as a daughter to succeed her sonless father, Caswyddian and Aseyneddin had tried to marry her by force of arms, and if not all of the lords of Elwynor had rebelled, and if a brave handful had died in her defense and a brave handful more still held Ilefínian against Tasmôrden, still she could not say that Murandys or even Ryssand was a worse lord. She would have to take the Regent’s throne by blood and iron, with Guelen troops. It would not come to her on a waft of love and tossed roses.

Her needle pricked her finger and a spot of blood welled up. She evaded the bleached linen, but it stained the thread, and she sucked the finger clean and snipped the spoiled thread, tasting copper of blood in her mouth as she looked up to an arrival in the doorway.

Luriel had indeed come to her small court, and made a deep and formal curtsy.

“Your Grace,” said Luriel.

“Lady.” She impulsively extended the wounded hand with the damp finger, and Luriel came to take it and to bow again in a rustle of fashionable petticoats, a cushioning flower of velvet and wool blossoming about her. Ninévrisë smiled on purpose when Luriel lifted her gaze to meet hers; and, reminiscent of the night of the fox-hued gown, she saw a strong-chinned countenance with brows like soaring wings, eyes full of cautious wit and defense and hope.

“Welcome,” she said, not altogether a matter of duty to Cefwyn: in some part, in a dearth of sharp wits in her small gathering, she indeed held hope of this woman Cefwyn had once thought of marrying. “Have you brought your stitching? Make room, make room for the lady, all of you.”

It was in immaculate consideration of precedence, who moved aside and who did not, and Luriel found a stool between Bonden-on-Wyk and Brusanne of Panys, who cast her curious, shortsighted looks, and above Dame Margolis, a knight’s lady, common as the earth and as generous.

“And how was the journey?” Bonden-on-Wyk wanted to know, and Luriel, delving into a fashionable little sewing basket, gave the widow a bland, curious look.

“Very well, Your Grace,” Luriel said. “As any return must be. I have no dissatisfactions… not a one.”

Did she not? Brusanne was not quick as some, but counting the rumors of last night, she blushed rosy pink.

Oh, indeed, Luriel was no dullard, no starched Quinalt virgin. This was the girl who would very gladly have been queen, and who was far from blind to the substance and the claim in her remarks.

“How fine that a thaw preceded your arrival,” Ninévrisë returned the shot. “And how fortunate.”

Their glances crossed like rapiers, and her husband’s former mistress engaged with a look sober as a salute.

“I found it so.”

“Confusion and bad weather to my enemies one and all, and kind winds to my friends that come to this court: is that linen you have? What a lovely shade! Let me see it.”

Luriel brought the frame close to her, and for a moment they were very close. “Your Grace is very kind.”

“To my friends. I value loyalty very greatly.”

The others had fallen silent, listening to the passage between them, and Bonden-on-Wyk said, “A winter wedding, will it be?”

“Madiden!” said Olwydesse.

“Well, will it?” Bonden-on-Wyk asked, and Luriel gave a small, fierce smile.

“Ah, gossip never waits an hour in this room, does it?”

“Well?”

“He’s handsome,” Luriel said, gathering her frame and setting it toward the light, “and has very fine prospects.”

She did not say, in this room, what those prospects were. Ninévrisë saw the glances and the lips nipped shut just in time, the widow Madiden’s head tilted like a wise carrion crow’s above a likely morsel.

Oh, Cefwyn, Ninévrisë thought, feeling still the prick of the fine steel. Lucky escaped, lucky this one’s not with child.

Jealous? No, not of such a narrow escape: he knows, he well knows this lady. Cold steel for a bed-mate, this one: not one ever to trust.

Nor to envy… why should I ever envy Luriel? She had her moment and lost it, and is wise enough to take charity from me, while it profits. I would I could like her, but she is only wiser than Artisane.

Give me my kingdom, give me land across the river from Murandys, and we’ll see whose fisheries supply the court; give me an army at my beck and call and see if Ryssand’s daughter brings another lying accusation of me.

Needles in and needles out, gold flowers and green leaves on the linen while winter frosts the glass and the heavens glow white with fire. Winter weddings and springtime war.

Give me the soil of my land underfoot, and let my husband see he’s married no fool. Meanwhile I smile on his mistress and let the vixens in my hall wonder for a season: they see my husband’s foreign wife, but not yet my father’s daughter.

My father, sealed in stone in Althalen’s ruined walls, my father, who wards the seat of kings from strayed Amefin sheep and attends shepherds in their wanderings… father who saved me from marriages to cowards and to his dying hour helped me to the husband I have. Wise father, brave father, see me sit and stitch so patiently, making wishes with every thread. Luriel has until spring to win my friendship: I will allow her that fair trial.

Father, who had the Sihhë blood and passed it down to me, bind wishes in the threads that make meadow flowers in this cold white day. Bespell me the bright blue of the Lines you keep, the palace you ward, all Lines and light. I do not forget. How could I forget?

Father, Uleman, Regent for all these years, I love him. I do love. I forgive him all the past, all his grandfather’s works and all his father’s: I love, and forgiving is natural for one who loves. I make him these silly flowers, I stitch the meadows of the spring when we will go to war, he and I, and when I pray the people believe in me. I stitch the blue Lines for a border, your palace of light, dear Father.

They give me this silly, sotted priest, Father, because the Quinalt fears my skirts, have you heard this foolishness, where you lie? Or has a rumor of it gotten to you? You said I had the Gift, in small part. If I have it, in small part, however, small, I sew my wishes into this linen cloth, smiling at my husband’s mistress, and thinking we must be allies, we two, against the folly abundant in this room.

I sew wishes for an early spring. And for your easy rest, and for the rest of the dead at Ilefínian, for there will be many, many dead. Give Tasmôrden no peace and the faithful dead at least the hope of rescue.

I sew wishes that Tristen be well, my husband’s best ally, and the one he dares not regard. He would cross the river and my husband forbids it, all for Murandys, and Ryssand, who threaten him: when I am Regent in Elwynor, I will remember all of this against them.

The sun passed the edge of the glass, just, and light grew less intense.

“I don’t like this green,” said Bonden-on-Wyk. “I think a brighter shade.”

“Too bright,” said Panys’ daughter, who was a creature of pale shades about her dress, always faded.

“Not too bright,” said Luriel. “Add a darker for contrast. That other green. There’s a match. —What do you think, Your Grace?”

The girl who had worn vixen colors to reconcile with the king asked her opinion.

“Oh, I think you’re quite right,” Ninévrisë said, willing to be an ally. Give her a run at the leash, and see where she went, Ninévrisë thought, and consciously smiled. “I approve.”

“Well, well,” said Bonden-on-Wyk, peering at the combination of greens. “Who’d have thought those two would go together? ”