Fortress of Owls

Chapter 1

Sergeant Gedd was back from Guelessar, a fortnight past all expectation and after they had all but given him up for lost. “And glad to be here, m’lord,” Gedd said fervently, reporting to Tristen in the privacy of his apartments. Gedd had surely come straight up from the stables, stopping only to wash the dust from face and hands, for the fair hair about his face was wet, his beard, ordinarily carefully trimmed, had stubble about the sides, and his clothes were spattered with two colors of mud different than any in the stable yard.

In such guise, too, of dirt and disrepute, Gedd handed him a precious and very belated letter. Stripped of coverings of dirty cloth, it emerged cleanly, resplendent with red ribbon and the royal seal. “Forgive me that I’m so late. Word directly from the Lord Commander, too, m’lord, that I have in memory.”

“Tell it to me,” Tristen said. He laid the letter on the desk before him, as Uwen stood near his chair, silent as the brazen dragons. “What happened?”

“Respects first, m’lord, from the Lord Commander, and then this, which is weeks late: that the guardsmen who left the Amefin garrison by your leave have gone to the Quinalt for protection and so has the patriarch of Amefel. The Lord Commander says to tell Your Grace kindly give him no more such gifts. His words, my lord, as he said them, forgive me.”

He could all but hear Idrys say it, and he was glad it was no sharper barb. He knew he deserved one.

But weeks late. He had no more recent news and had feared to send.

“And from His Majesty,” Gedd said, “who says to tell Your Grace that the patriarch of Amefel put the Holy Father in a difficult position, and that there’s trouble in the Quinaltine. Those were His Majesty’s words. Trouble in the Quinaltine. He said tell Your Grace that His Reverence has friends in Ryssand.”

“Was that all?”

“Yes, my lord. He gave me the letter with his own hand, and I was straight off and away.”

“But late.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Why?” Uwen asked, from the side and behind, and Gedd cast an anxious look in his direction.

“I had someone on my trail. I took up to the hills. But… Your Grace might want to hear… talk started about the tavern…”

“Tell me everything,” Tristen said. “Don’t hurry.”

Gedd drew a breath. He was a strong man and a good soldier: it was from exhaustion, surely, that his hand shook as he raked back the damp hair. “Priests are going about the town preaching, talking against wizards and Bryaltines and generally against the war, that’s one thing. There’s talk among the people against Amefel and Her Grace as a bad influence on the king, and the war as costing too much, being too dangerous, and bringing honest Guelenmen among wizards and heretics. That’s everywhere.”

It was dire news. And unjust. Cefwyn was good. What he did was good, and they said as unkind things about him as they said about Heryn Aswydd.

“Everyone says so?” he asked.

“Say that it’s safer to say that than to praise His Majesty,” the sergeant said, “on account of His Majesty’s friends don’t damn you to hell or look at you as would curdle milk. There’s ugliness in the town, and it’s got knives, m’lord.”

“He’s in danger.”

“As I’d say, and as the Lord Commander knows, and I think His Majesty knows. But,” Gedd said, “His Majesty rode against the dark at Lewen field, such as none of the layabouts complaining never had to face, and if a common man can say, m’lord, there’s a king.”

“He is that,” Tristen said, and added, half to convince himself, “and if he knows, then he’ll deal with it.”

“Only so’s he guards ’is back,” Uwen said, “against Ryssand.”

“And you were attacked?” Tristen asked.

“Not as it were attacked,” Gedd said, “only there were men after me that I knew was the Lord Commander’s, and then they weren’t there, and these were, and they weren’t his. And right or wrong I decided a late message was better than no message and went to ground. There’s a nasty mood even to the villages, such as I was glad I wasn’t wearing Amefin colors on the way in. Safer to be a common traveler, out of Llymaryn, says I, as I came into Guelessar: they’re pious down there, left and right, and I know the brogue. And being Guelen,” Gedd added, “I could get through. On the way back, I gave up being Llymarish and in the open and just hid and moved as I could… I let my horse go. Master Haman says he’s not made it here; he might have run for his old pastures, up by Guelemara. And the one the Lord Commander’s men gave me… no telling where he is. I walked.”

“Well ye did,” Uwen said, “by that account.”

“The other news—” Something came to Gedd, on a deep breath. “The other news, which may not be news, now: Murandys’ daughter’s to marry Panys’ son, by the by. She’s come back to court, and she’s betrothed to Rusyn of Panys.”

“Luriel?” He had heard of the lady in his days in Guelessar, and that she had been Cefwyn’s almost-betrothed, and had left to something like exile.

That she had come back to court was surely no good news.

“Come on His Majesty’s invitation,” Gedd went on, “as had to be, of course. Her Grace met her in the face of all the court and took her amongst her women. This isn’t what His Majesty told me, but it’s what I heard in the town, and I heard it in more than one place, so I take it for true. And the Lord Commander isn’t himself daunted, but it was his instruction to wrap the message up in rags and shove it deep in the rocks or heave it down a well if I thought I was followed. And I thought of that. But I thought I could get it through.”

“Well-done in that,” Uwen said, “too. —Ye were careful what ye said, yourself, I wager. Was it in Guelessar ye picked up these followers?”

“Captain, I swear to you, my tavern-going was discreet. Between talking to the Lord Commander immediately as I reached the town and being called to His Majesty the same night, in secret, in all that time I had the Lord Commander’s men close by. I gave out freely that I was a courier, but I said I was from Llymaryn, and hoped I didn’t meet a Llymarishman, which I didn’t. After I had my meeting with His Majesty and left the Guelesfort, I had the Lord Commander’s men in the street, them as I knew were his, while I nabbed my gear and my horse from the tavern where I’d left him. And I had the Lord Commander’s men on the street, too, and out past the gate, where they gave me a horse besides my own that they’d brought. That was how they watched over me, and I took the warning, m’lord, and was watching my back, when one hour they were there and the next was a pair of riders coming up on me. That morning was when I saw a third show up, and I ran hard and sent my horses one way and I went to ground, right then. The rest was walking, mostly at night.”

“And gettin’ the better of the Lord Commander’s men,” Uwen said with a shake of his head. “That ain’t ordinary bandits. And from the town. I’d almost say there’s a man amongst ’em as ain’t on the straight. That’s too damn quick.”

“We can’t warn him,” Tristen said in distress, “except by another messenger.”

“I’d trust the Lord Commander to figure it. His men ain’t fools, but I’d lay to it one’s a scoundrel.”

“I wish he may find out,” Tristen said, with all intent, such that the gray space shivered.

“And you an’ I’ll have a talk,” Uwen said to Sergeant Gedd, “an’ a healthy sup of ale, an’ see what little things ye might know else, if there’s any ye’ve forgot. Besides which, ye’re due the cup, and a good horse, as I’m sure His Grace will say.”

“I do,” Tristen said, his thoughts meanwhile ranging to Guelen hills, and ambushes, and Idrys, with Ryssand’s men insinuated into every council, in among the priests, likely; and now spying on Idrys’ spies.

“Thank you, Captain. My lord.”

“Thank you,” Tristen said fervently, and as Uwen gathered up the sergeant and showed him out, he uneasily cracked the seal with a small knife, and spread out the letter that had been so long in coming.

My dear friend, it began, which he heard as warmly as if Cefwyn had said it aloud.

The weather has held remarkably well. We are now moving supply.

The good sergeant who carries this letter will have other, more common news for you. I should say that Her Grace is well and sends you her love and her great thanks for your rescue of her subjects, and I send also my approval of all you have done.

Yet I pray you recall the Quinalt steps and the means by which a very little thing became a great controversy. You must know that various persons returning from Amefel have spread rumors concerning the people’s regard for you, and the open display of Sihhë symbols in the market, which I am sure is true. They were doing it this summer. But remember that certain men hold all that is Amefin in great fear, and the tale of strange doings on your riding out to meet Ivanor has reached the Quinaltine, although it is possible that the story has grown in the telling.

Grown and grown, Tristen thought. He was part of the discontent among Cefwyn’s subjects, and the source of trouble with the Quinalt, and now a messenger going to the king went in fear for his life. He did not know how to mend it.

Her Grace takes great encouragement in your support of Elwynim women and children. I find encouragement knowing you are doing as you have always done in defending them, and I give you all authority you may require to secure them a safe haven.

There are many things I would write, but the messenger is waiting.

We hope that Emuin is well. This cold damp always makes his joints ache, and we hope he is keeping himself well and warm.

This, in full knowledge of Emuin’s habits with the shutters.

We are close now to the Midwinter and wait for spring. You, not being Aswydd, I hold not therefore bound by the prohibitions laid on the Aswydds. I hold that your preparations against incursions from the north are in accordance with your oath to defend the land. To this I set my seal, below, with all love and confidence in your just use of that authority.

Cefwyn gave him liberty then to defend the helpless, clearly aware of disaffection in his own Guelenfolk on his account, and still adding to his authority… but it was not alone Aeself and his men, but enough scattered bands to double the settlement at Althalen… so Drusenan had sent word two days ago. Bands of Elwynim loyal to the lady Regent or opposed to Tasmôrden—they were not quite the same—had avoided the bridge that had stood open with Guelen and Ivanim forces on the watch, as a potential trap. Women and children and the old and lame had come that way as the only way they knew how to take, but the fugitives from the lines at Ilefínian were veteran men and wary of what seemed too easy. They had crossed the icy waters at other points, however great the effort; they had kept their weapons and sought refuge with sympathetic Amefin, who had sent them to Drusenan, and Drusenan had directed them to Althalen—for they refused to go to the Guelen camp and turn in their weapons to Guelenmen: Drusenan had sent an anxious message, but the accommodation had been peaceful, even counting two different loyalties amid the armed bands… their situation was so desperate, fearing Tasmôrden and with their own lord lost, they declined to fight each other.

Walls were up at Althalen, so Drusenan had also said in his report, and two roofed halls stood, built of the tumbled rubble and the still-standing ruin, one hall for the women and children and one for the men, dividing some households in the need for quick and snug shelter, and flinging Ninévrisë’s men in with those who were otherwise minded. The Elwynim doubtless wished better, but they had not yet built better, and had to work together to have the roofs they did have.

The birth of a child in the camp, Drusenan had written, seemed to have brought men to some better sense.

But Drusenan had sent word, too, written for him, for Drusenan was better at building than at writing:

Some of Her Grace’s men ask to settle a camp on the river and attack Tasmôrden from there, but I have not agreed, believing Your Grace to hold a contrary opinion. What shall I say to them?

Refuse them, he had sent back that same day, and urgently. They will have their day, and justice done, but not yet.

There were more men now than women in Althalen, with horses, and grain was now a matter of critical need. Cevulirn’s men had ridden home after their seven days of watch at the bridge, with the lives of fifty-eight women, old men, wounded, and children saved at that crossing and now settled at Althalen; Drusenan’s men at least now had the help of the Elwynim who were whole of body, who carried supply on their backs, and who hewed wood and raised their walls with little grumbling and in decent gratitude.

Gratitude flourished far better there, it seemed, than in the streets of Guelemara.

We have missed you, Cefwyn’s letter said, a postscript, below the. seal.

The pigeons are in deep mourning. I have taken to feeding them myself. I have become superstitious on their account.

He could scarcely imagine. Cefwyn had so many important other concerns.

The weather continues to amaze me. I think of your urging after Lewenbrook and yet I know well the hazards if we had proceeded.

Below the seal Cefwyn the king had fallen silent and at that point his friend had begun to write to him, a hasty scrawl, an outpouring of the heart after he had said everything so carefully, so discreetly. What followed was not discreet.

In some measure I trusted your urgings then and wished to go on across the river, and yet I see around me the disaffections and distrust that would have rendered all we might do ineffectual to assure a just and true peace. Talk to Emuin. I would that I could. Consult with Cevulirn. I recommend him as a friend and a wise man.

Then the handwriting changed, and grew more careful.

I add one other thing: some see in you the fulfillment of Elwynim prophecy. I have been aware of this from the start. If you are the one I think you are, no matter how dark, you have no less of my love and regard, which I hope you have in kind for me. This Emuin advised me to win for myself, and it was the wisest advice and best he ever gave me.

Cefwyn knew it all, and trusted him, and was not angry.

It was a precious letter, and Tristen sat with his hands on it as if that in itself could bridge the distance and place his hands in Cefwyn’s hands. His heart beat hard, a knot stopped his throat, and he heard again the bells that had rung the hour they had parted, the wild pealing, so joyous, when there was nothing of joy for either of them in the hour, but only for their enemies.

His pigeons had sprung aloft, the banners had flown bravely on the wind, but in that hollow pealing of bronze, the warmest thing in the world had been Cefwyn’s embrace, and the look Cefwyn had flung him eye-to-eye before the Quinaltine steps.

You have no less of my love, Cefwyn wrote now.

And the world became warm and safe for a heartbeat.

Win Cefwyn’s friendship, Emuin said, but he did not take Cefwyn’s reassurance to fulfill that, not entirely, not truly, in the magical sense. Emuin had given his advice, and like Mauryl’s advice, it struck at the root of intentions, not at the flower.

And both root and the flower were important to him, one having to do with what one meant to do… and the other, most fearsome, with the outcome of it.

With all his heart he wished to write back to Cefwyn… but considering the message within Idrys’ message, the way he had protected Gedd, and the danger Gedd had run to reach him, the exchange they had already had exposed not only the messenger but Cefwyn and Ninévrisë to danger. If their enemies did not know the content of the message, at least they knew a message had come and gone, and at such a time.

He had no news worth the risk of the bearer’s life. The business with the bridge was done: in spite of Idrys’ urgent message to send him no more gifts… he had to fear he had: all the discontent carters who had labored in one service after another, who might even as he sat here be telling theit tale of Elwynim and walls and settlements at Althalen in every tavern in Guelemara.

There was nothing he could do but wish Cefwyn’s people to see the truth, and to know their welfare lay more with their king who wished an honest, lasting peace, than with Ryssand, whose wishes were tangled and dark with hatred, some for Cefwyn, but far, far more of it for the Bryaltines and the Teranthines and everything southern… himself not least or last in that reckoning. There was fertile ground for hostile wizardry, or ambitious, or greedy, or any that did not scruple to use a hateful, hating man.

Ryssand’s son was dead. He had a daughter for his heir… which the Quinaltines, ironically, would not allow, and he the greatest supporter of the strict Quinaltines. What was he to do?

Something to save himself, that would somehow twist and turn until it came out profitable to himself, that was more than likely.

And meanwhile he could get no message to Idrys to tell him there was a traitor within his ranks, no message to Cefwyn to assure him of better news from the south—not without risking a life and possibly putting a dangerous letter in the hands of Lord Ryssand.

He had now only boats to look for… Sovrag lord of Olmern’s boats, and the grain they carried. The storm surge had gone down the Lenúalim, the river ran calmly now at its ordinary level, by the reports he had from Anwyll, and there was no reason for delay, unless Sovrag’s boats had suffered—

Or unless Sovrag had doubts or fears of aiding him, considering the storm brewing in the heart of Ylesuin. Any of the lords who had awareness of the situation Gedd had reported might well think twice about joining their Midwinter feast… and Sovrag’s grain had to be here to avoid famine.

He gave it another day and then he must send a messenger south to Olmern, a far safer direction to ask reasons; and he had to send another rider to Cevulirn to inform him of the delay in supply for the horses.

Midwinter was coming on apace, and the needs of the province were absolute. If Sovrag for some reason failed them, then they still must obtain the grain, all the same… if not from Sovrag, then they might appeal next to his constant enemy among the allies of Lewen field, the lord of Imor Lenúalim, dour, Quinalt Umanon.

Umanon might or might not favor their enterprise, might or might not be keenly aware of the sentiment against him, and might or might not answer Cevulirn’s invitation—and if he came, might or might not tell everything he learned to friends to the north. The plain fact was that Umanon was a Guelen, different from all the other southern lords, associated with Lewenbrook only because Cefwyn as a Guelen prince had brought him in to have the heavy cavalry Cefwyn relied on.

Now a southern call had gone out, furtive and hoping for secrecy… and yet they had not omitted Umanon, who had been one of them, whatever else he was.

And would he answer the call, or betray them?

A gathering of all the south was a difficult secret to keep… and the more difficult as the time drew closer and all the staff down to Cook and her crew assembled the makings of a great holiday.

The best news in recent days was the assembling of young men of Amefel, earnest young men… feckless boys, Uwen called most of them, but well-meaning, with some experienced veterans in the number. It was a good lot. But they were far from the Amefin guard that was yet to be… that must exist by the time the buds broke on the trees.

The Guelen Guard, at Uwen’s order, had undertaken to show the men the use of the long Guelen lance and the small sword, and that the training and short tempers and stung pride failed to provoke Amefin and Guelenmen to open warfare, it was itself a wonder… but that was the regiment they had at hand, and that was what had to be.

The southern longbow many already knew; and perhaps half had horsemanship enough, but those were green youths on the edge of nobility, accustomed to ride to the hunt, vying with one another to be first to the quarry—not to make an iron front against an enemy. The lads, as Uwen called them, were in great earnest for their lords’ pride and their own, but there were two sent home with broken bones, and one all but died of Maudbrook’s icy water on a windy day— his horse had sent him there.

But in recent days the recruits had gone out about the land, faring out toward the remote villages to parade their weapons and make known the authority that sent them.

More, even given the chance there were enemies in the land, they practiced ambushes on one another in the bitter cold and the winter-barren land, merry as otters, Uwen called them. They were noisy, determined, and since the Guelenmen teaching them had not killed them, they had necessarily improved in the lance and the sword.

Tomorrow, orders which also lay on Tristen’s desk, under his hand as he read, they were to ride east to Assurnbrook, as far west as the limits of Marna Wood; they had already ridden down to Modeyneth and to Anwyll’s camp, to Trys Ceyl in the south and Sagany and Emwysbrook, to Dor Elen, Anas Mallorn, and Levey, displaying the banners, answering questions, bearing news.

That was one thing he wished he could tell Cefwyn. And, aside from the want of grain, stores had turned up, out of cellars in town, out of caves and cists in the hills: reserves of grain, preserved meat, gold and silver which the lords had held secret, and, mysteriously, too, but from different sources, a number of weapons which had not been in the armory since Lewenbrook had shown up in the hands of these young men.

“As they ain’t fools,” Uwen had said wryly, “an’ now they know they have a lord who ain’t Guelen, why, back the gear comes from under their beds.”

Over all, while the news from Guelemara chilled Tristen’s heart, there was reason to think the south was safer than it had been. If Tasmôrden intruded into his lands at this very hour he would meet both an armed and organized band of Elwynim veterans… and the otters, those small, scattered squads of an Amefin cavalry he would not expect, on horses that were increasingly fit.

And that Amefin cavalry was armed with both bow and lance, for harrying an enemy and making his foraging impossible: such were their orders—no all-out engagement, but a deliberate harrying, keeping contact with an enemy band while they sent a series of messengers with word to Henas’amef, to bring in the heavier-armed Guelens.

There was that force out and about.

Modeyneth and Anas Mallorn, which lay near the sites of likely crossings, had built stout shutters and towers for archers.

The old wall beyond Modeyneth was now, by work proceeding by day and night, man-high across the road, with a stout gate, braces, and an archer’s tower. The men who built there, both of Modeyneth and other villages of Bryn, built in weather which never mired the roads, and built with the advantage of stones already cut.

Not least, Anwyll and the Dragon Guard at the river maintained close, fierce guard over sections of decking which could again be laid rapidly over the bridge frameworks, and which were stout enough to support even wheeled traffic—once his Midwinter gathering determined to secure the other bridgehead as theirs, and set up a camp inside Elwynor.

They were as near ready as he could hope… save only the grain to feed all these men. And the fear, now made clear in Gedd’s report, that he might have taken far too much for granted, regarding the Guelen and Ryssandish fear of him and the south. Talk to Emuin, Cefwyn had written him.

Paisi, hair disheveled, roused from the diurnal night of the shuttered tower, made tea. Emuin read Cefwyn’s letter atop the clutter of charts, then nodded soberly as Tristen meanwhile relayed Gedd’s report in all its alarming substance.

“Well, well,” Emuin said, and bit his lip then, shaking his head. “What Cefwyn wishes me to explain when he says consult me, is the Quinalt, and its distaste for things Amefin. I think you know that.”

“I know the guardsmen I sent and the patriarch all went to Cefwyn’s enemies. And the drivers of the carts I sent back will talk.”

“The carters you sent back will talk, and the soldiers that went without leave have talked, and the Amefin patriarch has certainly had words to say within those walls, all manner of words about the grandmothers in the market, and about me, and any other sign of wizardry. That’s nothing we can prevent now.”

“As for the other, sir… the prophecy…” He disliked even to think about it, but it was there, part of the letter, with Cefwyn’s assurances.

“It’s all one.”

“It is not one, sir. I fear it’s not. The carters will talk about the same things the patriarch complained of, charms in the market, and about the Elwynim at Althalen—”

“No small matter.”

“But the greater is, Ninévrisë’s father called me young king. Auld Syes did much the same. The Elwynim wait for a King To Come, and Tasmôrden flies the banner of the King of Althalen above Ilefínian.”

“Does he?”

“Yes!”

“What will you do about it?”

I won’t allow it, he almost said. But he thought then of the disparate elements he had just set forth to Emuin, and found in them subtle connections to events around him that frightened him to silence.

“Tea, sir, m’lord.” Taking advantage of the silence, Paisi desperately set the tray down and poured. It was bitter cold in the tower, and Paisi’s hands trembled, hands as grimy as ever they had been in the street.

“Wash,” Emuin said. “Treat my potions as you treat common mud, boy, and you’ll poison both of us.”

“It’s only pitch, sir.”

“Dirt,” said Emuin. “Scrub. You shouldn’t sleep dirty, boy. Gods!”

“Sir,” Paisi whispered, and effaced himself.

Emuin took up a teacup. “What will you do about it?” Emuin asked again.

“I don’t know, sir,” Tristen said, turning his own in his fingers. “I think the first is coming here and asking you what I ought to do. And I earnestly pray you answer me. This is beyond lessons. I can’t take lessons any longer. What I do may harm Cefwyn.”

There was long silence, long, long silence, and Emuin took a studied sip of the tea, but Tristen never looked away or touched his cup.

“So you will not let me escape this time,” Emuin said.

“I ask, sir. I don’t demand. I ask for Cefwyn’s sake.”

“And with all your heart.”

“And with all my heart, sir.”

“Do you think you are the King To Come? Does that Unfold to you, as some things do?”

He asked Emuin to give up his secrets—and his question to Emuin turned back at him like a sword point, direct and sharp and simple.

“No,” he said from the heart. “I’ve no desire to be a king or the High King or any king. If I could have Cefwyn back as Prince Cefwyn and his father alive so he didn’t have to work so, and all of us here at Amefel, that’s what I would most wish, for everything to be what it was this summer… but I can’t have that, and I could only do him harm if I wished it, so I don’t. I won’t. You say I must win Cefwyn’s friendship… and that doesn’t come of anything I’ve done that I can see. Everything I’ve done has turned his own people against him!”

“Young lord,” Emuin said, “you’ve gained very many things, and know far more, and now you’ve almost become honest.”

“I have never lied, sir!”

Emuin fixed him with a direct and challenging stare. “Have you not?”

“Not often. —Not lately.”

“Ah. And have you often told the truth?”

“Have you told it yourself, sir. Forgive me, but is this not the lesson you showed me, to keep silent, to leave and not answer questions. I keep quiet the things I fear could do harm, and the things I don’t understand!”

“Exactly as I do.”

The anger fell, left him nothing, and still no answer.

“Is that all you learned of me?” Emuin asked. “Silence?”

“No, sir, there were very many good lessons.”

“And do you not, as you say, count it good, to keep silent when speaking might work harm?”

“What harm would it have worked, for you to have stayed by me this summer? What harm would it work now, for you to tell me the dangers ahead, if I swear to take your advice?”

“Harm that I might do? Oh, much. Much, if I interfere—”

“—If you interfere with Mauryl’s working. But do you say, then, sir, that you can interfere with Mauryl’s working? Or can anyone? Are you that great a wizard?”

“Who are you?”

Back to wizard-questions, the quick reverse, the subtle attack, and that one went straight as a sword to the heart.

“Who are you?” Emuin repeated. “This time I require an answer.”

Tristen drew a deep breath, laid his hands on the solid table surface, on the charts, the evidence and record of the heavens, for something solid to grasp… for very nearly he had said, defiantly, out of temper, and only to confound the old man,

I am Barrakkêth.

So close he had come, so disastrously close it chilled him.

“I am Tristen,” he said calmly, lifting his head and staring straight into Emuin’s measuring eyes. “I am Mauryl’s Shaping. I am Cefwyn’s friend and your student. I am the lord of Althalen and Ynefel. Tristen says all, sir, and all these other things are appurtenances.”

“Not lord of Amefel?” Emuin asked with that same measuring look, and his heart beat hard.

Crissand, he thought.

Crissand, Crissand, Crissand.

“Cefwyn must grant me Amefel,” he said to the wall, the wind, the fire in the hearth, not to the boy sitting silent or the wizard gazing at his back. “Cefwyn must grant me this one thing.”

“Has he not? It seems to me he granted you Amefel.”

“No. He made me lord of Amefel, in fealty to him. He hasn’t given it to me. And that he must do, for his own safety.”

There was a long, a very long silence.

“You know,” said Emuin, “if other things have disturbed Ryssand and Murandys, this one will hardly calm their fears.”

“Crissand Adiran is lord of Amefel. He is a king, master Emuin, he is the Aswydd that should rule, and if I set him here, on this hill, and see him crowned, I would think I had done well, and that I had done Cefwyn no disservice at all.”

There was long silence, a direct stare from Emuin and Paisi’s eyes as large as saucers.

“The next question. What are you?”

“Mauryl’s Shaping, sir. Cefwyn’s friend, and your student, lord of Ynefel, lord of Althalen.”

“And of those folk there settled?”

“If they remain there.”

“And this is your firm will.”

“I am Mauryl’s Shaping.”

“What we say three times gathers force, and what you say three times has uncommon force, lord of Althalen.”

“I’ve told you all I know, sir, and beyond, into things I hope. So what do you advise me to say? More, what to do, sir? Idrys has a liar in his service, and Cefwyn is in danger.”

“If I knew that, young lord, I’d sleep of nights.” Emuin moved the letter aside and moved one of his charts to the surface, a dry, stiff, and much-scraped parchment. He looked at it one way and another, and then cast it toward him, atop a stack of equally confused parchments.

“This, this, young lord, is as much as I do know. This is the reckoning that Mauryl himself would have seen coming, that once in sixty-two years these portents recur in the heavens, and where they occur at the Midwinter, there is the Great Year begun, that is, the time until the wandering stars hold court together and move apart again. This is the season of uncommon change… but this is nothing to you, I suspect.” Emuin’s tone took on a forlorn exasperation, much like Mauryl’s when confronting his helplessness. “Nothing Unfolds. No great revelation.”

“No, sir.” He looked at the parchment, and considered the things Emuin said and cast it down again, unenlightened. “I don’t know what you’re saying. About the stars, I gather, but nothing more. I know Mauryl studied them. And you do. But I’ve never understood the things you find.”

“Magic is an unfettered thing. You… are an unfettered thing. But wizardry, wizardry, young lord, is a matter of numbers… patterns, as nature itself is patterns, and the gathering of forces. Think you that winter happens by magic? No. Everything in nature, young lord, is a march of patterns, the chill in the air, the sleep of the trees, the waning of the summer stars and the rise of the winter ones, that in their turn will set…”

“These things I see, and you tell me they recur.”

“Yes! So if you would work a great work of wizardry, do you see, there’s no sense doing hard things, only the easy ones. Do you want a snow? Ask for it in winter! Much easier. Find patterns in nature and lay your own Lines where they go, much as you set the Lines of a great house, observing doors and windows where they want to be.”

Emuin seemed to expect agreement, understanding—something.

“Yes, sir.”

“But you don’t! All this is frivolous to you! You treat patterns the way a young horse treats fences, to have the fine green grass at your pleasure. And gods save us on the day you treat natural laws as that great dark stallion of yours treats stall slats, and simply kick them down.”

“I trust I’m never so inconsiderate of your work, sir, as Dys of master Haman’s boards.”

Emuin grunted, then gave a breath of a laugh, and at last chuckled and for the first time in a long time truly did regard him kindly. “Good lad. Good lad. When I fear you most, you have your ways to remind me you are Tristen.”

“I am. And shall be, sir. And never would treat your patterns carelessly. I have more understanding than my horse.”

Emuin did laugh, and wiped an eye with a gnarled finger, and wiped both, then his nose. “Oh, lad. Oh, young lord. We’re in great danger.”

“But we are friends, sir, and I’m yours, as I am Cefwyn’s.”

“That, too, is a snare, young lord, and one I avoid very zealously: we must both look at one another without trust, assuming nothing, as we love one another, as we love that rascal Cefwyn. Fear friendship with me! Avoid it! Examine my actions, as I do yours, and let us save one another.—But you asked, and I answered, and let me answer, again, such as I can. Hasufin—”

“Hasufin!”

“Regarding this matter of the Great Year, I say, sixty-two years of the ordinary sort, and Hasufin Heltain, who was a wizard, and who bound his life to the cycle of the Great Year. Great works need great patterns. And his was the most ambitious: to use the Great Year itself would have given him more than one opportunity for a long, difficult magic, at long intervals. But there is more: there’s a Year of Years, a pattern of patterns that only the longest-lived can see, let alone use. Do you guess? Hasufin is old, as Mauryl was old. And the dawn of the last Year of Years was the hour of Hasufin’s first seizure of Ynefel, when he drove Mauryl Gestaurien to seek help in the north. But before it was done… the Sihhë came down. And that was the pattern of that beginning. That was what Mauryl did to Hasufin Heltain: he wrought the Sihhë-lords into Hasufin’s rise, so he could never be free of them—and the Sihhë-lords, like your horse, respect no boundaries and kick down the bars. He lost. Mauryl rose… and the Sihhë-lords reigned.”

“And fell.”

“Ah, and the dawn of the last cycle, the second such time, you may well suspect, sixty-two years ago… was Hasufin’s second rise. We are in the last of the sixty-two years of the Great Year that marks the Year of Years. The spring solstice, last spring, when Hasufin overthrew Mauryl the second time… Mauryl knew his peril; and chose his moment: the time of rebirth, your birth, young lord. Now that Great Year closes and a new Great Year begins the next Year of Years in the season of the deepest dark. At Midwinter the last element of the heavenly court will enter the House in which all the others stand. This movement marks the dawn, at midnight, of that new Year of Years. At Midwinter the moon stands, changeable queen that she is, at the darkest of the dark. By the time the sun rises, either the elements of the Great Year favor Hasufin… or something stands in opposition to him. What is, at that dawn, will be, for centuries of years as Men reckon time.”

“So Mauryl never sent me to Lewenbrook. That wasn’t what he wanted of me.”

“Oh, it was certainly part of it. But Cefwyn opposed Hasufin. Cefwyn opposed him, and opposes him now, and there’s that damned Elwynim prophecy of a King To Come. It’s probably true, more’s the pity. Uleman was a good wizard, but he talked too much, and now everyone expects there to be a new High King. It doesn’t serve Cefwyn well at all… and by chance it doesn’t help Uleman’s daughter, either.”

Here was truth, so much truth it was hard to know what part of it to seize and question, but he found one question salient and unavoidable.

“And is Hasufin our enemy still?” Tristen asked. “And shall I fight him again? And where?”

“I can’t say,” Emuin answered him with a shake of his head. “Above all, Midwinter Eve is perilous to us, and of all damned days you might have chosen to assemble the lords… that one you never asked me.”

“I had no knowledge. Now I do. What other times shall I fear?”

“The spring solstice… evidently,” Emuin said. “But what more may happen I don’t know. I haven’t lived through a Year of Years. You have.”

“I haven’t lived.”

“As much as Hasufin. Mauryl’s the only one who’s lasted one in the flesh, as it were. And now is stone, in his own walls, so you say.”

He shivered, not wishing to recall that day of waiting, that terrible hour, when he knew the enchantment of the faces was not the ordinary course of the world, and that there was something dreadful about Ynefel, where the Sihhë had ruled, where the Lord Barrakkêth had maintained a dreaded fortress… where at last only Mauryl had lived, alone, in solitary correspondence with the latter generations of Men, at Althalen, and what Men had used to call Hen Amas, and now Henas’amef.

“So Mauryl did the best he could: sent you, without warning, without guidance, without instruction… lord of Althalen. That you surely are. Lord of Ynefel… I would never dispute. That you are Tristen… I leave that to you, and would never say otherwise. This I do tell you: the stars point to Midwinter. The hinge of the year. The hinge of many years, this time, when all things reach an end, and a beginning, and when patterns begin for the next Year of Years. Against your years, I am a youth.” Emuin reached across the table to lay his gnarled hand on his young one, a touch like Mauryl’s, half-remembered, touching his very heart. “Tristen is your name. So be it. Have a sip of tea. It’s grown cold, boy. Boy!”

“Sir!” said Paisi, scrambling up.

“Tea. Cakes if they’ve escaped your avarice.”

“Avarice, sir?”

“Things don’t Unfold to him,” Emuin said, aside, “and, thief that he was, he has no notion what avarice is. A fine boy. A discreet boy, who has no desire to become a toad. Where are the cakes, Paisi?”

“I’ll ask Cook,” Paisi said, swinging the kettle over the fire and poking up the heat. “I’ll be back, I’ll be right back, sir. I di’n’t hear a thing, I di’n’t.”

“Toads,” Emuin said, and Paisi adjusted the kettle and fled, banging the door, or the wind did it, seeping in from the cracks in the shutters.

Quiet occupied the tower, then, only the slight whistle of the wind.

“He’s no trouble, is he?” Tristen asked, hoping he had not inconvenienced master Emuin.

Emuin gathered up a handful of beads, a collection of knots and strings and feathers, beads and bits of metal. “A grandmother’s spell, a protection. He came back clattering with it, a thing of moderate potency, in very fact. Do you see the Sihhë coin?”

“Yes,” he said, curious, for just such a coin had banished him from Guelessar. “And you keep it?”

“The wretch gave it to me,” Emuin said, “saying I surely needed protection. And he had bought it with coin your Uwen gave him.”

“There’s no harm in it,” Tristen said, lifting it in his fingers. “Is there, master Emuin?”

“You see nothing amiss in it, do you?”

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“A grandmother’s spell, cast on me, if you please, and bought with Uwen’s spare pennies, from the rise of his good fortunes.” Emuin shook his head, and cast a pinch of powder into the fire. It burst in a shower of smoke, and a smell that would banish vermin. “Boys,” Emuin said. “He takes greatly to the powders and smokes. They make him sure I’m a wizard.”

“Yet so is he.”

“And steals cakes, the wretch!” Emuin laid aside the cords and trinkets, and dusted off his hands. “When a request would obtain them, he steals.”

“As you say, he is a thief. That’s his trade.”

“Out on it! But he must not curse. I fear that in him, above all else. I’ve told him so, in no uncertain terms.”

“Accept his gift,” Tristen said. “His stealth is a skill.”

Emuin lifted a white brow. “That it is, in its good time.” There was a riffle of touch in the gray place, an overwhelming sight of Emuin as a presence there, and the place they occupied was small and furtive in itself, their visits there few, these days, and now, after so much of shared confidences, they sat, touched and touching, only for comfort.

A little removed was a little mouse of a presence, visible, if one knew to look for it. Paisi the Gray, Tristen thought. Paisi the Mouse.

Above them the day, and before them the night and the ominous stars. He had a question and wrenched himself out of the comfort of the gray space and into the clutter of Emuin’s tower, where the old man sat, far less imposing than in that other place, with tea stains on his robe and ink on his fingers.

“What were the stars when Mauryl Summoned me, sir? Tell me something else. Am I bound to one year? Or to this Great Year of yours?”

“Gods know what you are bound to. Or… being Sihhë, gods know.”

A horse, running in the field. In his heart he had not known there was a boundary, a place, a fence, a limit to freedom, until Emuin and Uwen had begun to make him know the seasons, and the Year had unfolded to him, in its immutable cycles. He had viewed it with some dismay, to know such repetitions existed.

On such things Men pinned their memories. Uwen would say, in the winter of the great snow, or in the spring I was fighting in the south, and such wizardry did Men practice, fencing things in, establishing patterns as they made Lines on the earth.

“Is it wizards who made years?” he asked. Questions still came to him, though few there were he dared ask, these days.

“I believe it was,” Emuin said. “For so much of the craft relies on it. Yet we have no constraint on the moon, which observes its own cycles.”

“And what have you bound to this Year of Years? And what have you wrought, regarding me, sir?”

There was a smail silence, and Emuin turned as furtive as Paisi, and did not look him in the eyes at once.

“I’ve chosen to do very little.”

“Keeping an eye on me, as Uwen puts it.”

“So to say. And I can’t fault you, beyond your disposition to raise walls and give away provinces.”

He laughed, obediently, but his heart still labored under all that Emuin had said.

“Gods know what you are,” Emuin said then, “but I know what I am, which is an old wizard who has seen the largest pattern he knows reach its end and swing round again… or it will do so, on Midwinter, when my young lord is holding feast with the lords of the south. Then’s the hour to keep the wards tight and the fires lit. —After that, I’ll breathe more easily.”

“The wards.” He had forgotten their strange behavior, in that way wizardry slipped past one’s attention. “Do you remember that night, sir? Did you see it, the night when all the town stood in light?”

Emuin gazed at him curiously, as if struggling to recall. “Yes. That night. And I wondered was it you.”

Tristen shook his head. “Not that I was aware. I thought of you, sir. Or even Paisi. It wasn’t so much that something tried the wards. It was as if the town waked. As if the building did.”

Something happened then in the gray space, perhaps a subtle inquiry. And a two-footed mouse skipped on the stairs, fearing shadows and sounds in a hall gone strange to his eyes.

—Get up the stairs, young fool!

Emuin was stern and protective at once, and there was a rapid running on the steps from the scullery, and a rapid passage through the lower hall, wherein there was special danger, to a boy with a tray of cakes and a pot of jam.

—I’m coming, sir. I’m coming.

So Ynefel had seemed at times to live, and what he knew now for ghosts to haunt the stairs and trip an unwary lad.

In a strange way he felt grieved not to be Paisi, with no danger apparent to him but his own wise fear of shadows and cold spots on the stairs.

Had he not learned theft himself, and stealth, and known all the nooks and crannies of the old fortress at Ynefel?

And had he not gone as oblivious of its wards and its terrible secrets?

“Silly boy.” Emuin sighed. “He’s learned to hear us, you can tell, and we have few secrets. Now if he only learns a bit more, and respects the wards, we’ll have something in him.”

The grandmother’s cords and charms seemed peculiarly potent, almost a point of light in the gray space. Elsewhere in the town, an old woman had wished well, and now stopped in her weaving, and held a hand to her heart, for that wish might require a strength she had never had called. That heart all but burst with the shock, the life all but fled, before Tristen realized the outpouring of it and closed the gap with his own hand as he touched the cords of the charm.

He gathered them up, held them in both hands, and drew a bright, burning line from the Zeide to the roof of a house near the wall, and an old, old woman who had nearly died.

“Rash,” said Emuin. “Rash. You’ve made that woman a target.”

“I’ve given her a shield. So with all the town.”

There was a clatter on the stairs, a crash and a rattle just outside the door, a rush of wind as Paisi struggled to open it, wide-eyed and sweating from his haste.

“I di’n’t break the pot,” said Paisi, but edged a cake back from among the rest. “This ’un fell. I’ll eat it.”

“Nobly offered,” Emuin said. “Take two. Go, the water’s long since boiled, and His Grace is patient. Don’t offend him. He’s terribly dangerous when offended.”

“Aye,” said Paisi faintly, scrambling for the cups. “Aye, an’ I washed, sir! Cook made me.”

Chapter 2

Tailors and purveyors of costly goods were having a prosperous winter… first the royal wedding and now the wedding of Rusyn of Panys with Luriel of Murandys.

Luriel, who had come within a vow of being queen of Ylesuin, would yield nothing to a royal bride in show or extravagance: she was absolutely determined to have a pageantry to erase all memory of her disgrace, and her expense in satin cloth might have sustained the villages of her province through a far worse winter.

Cefwyn watched the bustle and hurry with a cautious eye, wondering himself just how much show and pageantry Lord Murandys would allow, and how much Luriel dared, with a keen eye as to whether at any point it went over that fine distinction between the redemption of Luriel and an affront to his wife.

Most of all he was glad that the to-ing and fro-ing and measuring now involved another bridegroom— and yet, and yet… to his astonishment the piles of fabric in the old scriptorium, the Royal Consort’s domain, brought down another controversy of petticoats, beginning with the fact that Luriel had chosen the traditional gown, and had not modeled herself off the fashion of the consort.

It was a decision which might have signified the bride’s desire simply to avoid controversy, and to avoid a slavish flattery of her royal patron, who, among other things, had no reason to invite comparison with her lord’s former lover.

But that lack of adherence to Ninévrisë’s side of the petticoat controversy ended up angering him, curious notion. He was offended, when Ninévrisë refused to take offense, and he could not lay his finger on what in Luriel’s choice annoyed him.

The fact was, the ladies did whisper that Luriel wished a traditional wedding, with all the Quinalt blessing: so the rumor reached him through Idrys, of all unlikely sources, and he was incensed, all but ready to signal his disfavor of Luriel in a public snub.

But he was not willing to bring the Majesty of Ylesuin to the issue, not ready to stamp the royal seal on a decree, gods help him, regarding ladies’ petticoats. There were limits. He had fought his battles on that ground once, and Ninévrisë had, and he told himself it was done.

And just as they held back, Fiselle, Ninévrisë’s maid, vain and feckless girl, unwittingly struck the telling blow in the fray, prattling on to Luriel’s maid how Her Grace refrained from sweets and heavy foods to keep her lovely figure, which one of course had to have, in order to wear Her Grace’s shape-revealing clothes.

A siege engine could hardly have kicked up more consternation, and as of one morning’s news, two of the ladies were wearing Ninévrisë’s single petticoats.

Then Luriel cast all hers away, down to a shift, even taking two panels from the gown.

If wishes were mangonels, bodies would lie like cordwood.

But everyone sincerely praised Luriel’s form, and the single petticoats had, in a sevenday, scandalized the Quinalt.

The frivolity of women, certain priests called it, and the flaunting of immorality.

Then, on royal suggestion, His Holiness countered from the pulpit that certain priests spent too much time considering frivolity and not enough attending the needs of the people.

Seven days of shot and countershot, and, portentous surely, while the snow piled higher across the river, the wind blew steadily warm in Ylesuin until most of the hills were bare. Sorcery, some said, and blessed sigils turned up on doors, and candles burned a sweet savor to the Quinalt, the prayers of the honest faithful, while the priests fired barbs at one another in a doctrinal war that had begun in the women’s court in the issue of petticoats and tradition and continued over the uncommon weather.

It made the king’s court seem lately quiet by comparison, and in the absence of controversy on his own doorstep, Cefwyn found himself spending untroubled evenings at his own fireside… comfortable and pleasant evenings, in which he might sit in private with his own wife and dine without the constant intervention of ill tidings from the riverside or the Quinaltine.

Without, too, the clack and clatter of court proceedings, since the lords seemed weary, also, hoping only to pass the wedding without disarrangement of the arrangements that had settled a winter truce. At last they knew where they stood, at least in the middle lands. At last they knew what they must do, beyond all the furor Ryssand had kicked up—and that was to see their young men equipped for war and their lands so arranged that the fisheries and the orchards would not much suffer for the young men’s absence for a season. The grain lands were exempt from the muster, and also the royal granaries would open, giving out the abundance they had stored in the good years previous.

It would be enough, all taken together.

In the meanwhile he looked forward to Luriel’s marriage for very private reasons: there seemed something mildly indecent in hearing from his own wife’s lips the doings of his former mistress and confidante, and while both of them could find wry humor in the situation—Luriel was a witty, wonderful young hothead, if it were someone else at whom her malice aimed—he was very ready to have an end of Luriel’s crises.

She might be some sober use when she had settled in as a married lady, for as often as not her shafts of wit flew at her uncle, for now that she was marrying well, she gained a voice, and her uncle had to worry whether Luriel the featherwit had any interests beyond finery.

“She’s likely gathering a fine dowry from her uncle,” Ninévrisë remarked, “just from her silence. One wonders what she knows.”

“Murandys has approached Panys seeking a conference,” Cefwyn said, holding her close, the two of them in night robes, and the fire crackling and friendly. “But Lord Maudyn isn’t guesting with him. He’s staying at the river in his tent until the Wedding, not even coming to the capital. Gods send me a dozen like Lord Panys.”

The damned carts had come home, thank the gods, undamaged, not mired on the roads or lost in snowdrifts… with a discontent lot of carters complaining of the high-handedness of the duke of Amerel, true, but Idrys had been ready for them, this time. With no more than a day’s sojourn in the town, the discontent carters had gone on to Lord Maudyn.

So the offended carters, ousted prematurely from the joys of Guelemara, surely spread rumors among the troops. But the guardsmen stationed there had the sobering sight of the river before them, and would surely find no fault in Tristen for making strong preparations in the south… not when they faced the eerily snowy shore of Elwynor just a wooden span away from their fair-weather side. And they would not fault a little friendly wizard-work in the distant south, when sorcery was a constantly rumored threat from across the river. Many of them were veterans, and the carters themselves might sing a different tune when the veteran guardsmen told their Midwinter tales.

Meanwhile, too, another simmering stew, the negotiations between Efanor and Corswyndam of Ryssand meandered on, and as yet Efanor signed no document. Ryssand was still aghast, perhaps, not having expected his proposal to be seriously considered… let alone accepted. More, there was the queasiness of a wedding preparation during an official mourning: Ryssand was high enough to set convention aside; Efanor certainly could… but by now Artisane had launched her own campaign, sure she would come back to court in all her glory.

Efanor had not broken to the lady the news that he had a fine estate wanting a lady’s hand, oh, at the remote end of Guelessar.

And in genuine courtesy to Luriel’s moment, they delayed the official announcement… but now with couriers rushing back and forth, necessarily through Murandys, Murandys ached to know what was in the messages… and evidently Ryssand had held Murandys, his old ally, from knowing anything.

“Do you suppose Ryssand holds Prichwarrin responsible for his son?” Ninévrisë wondered quietly.

“I’ve wondered, too. Prichwarrin urged it too far. It was Brugan’s stupidity, no mending that, but Prichwarrin didn’t take strong enough action. It wouldn’t grieve me if those two fell out.”

He asked Idrys, on the following day, whether there was any hint of breach.

“Murandys sends home often,” Idrys said, “but I’ve no report he’s receiving messages from Ryssand. He seems genuinely concerned, and has a worried look when anyone mentions priests. This is a man who may not know as much as we do.”

“Perhaps after the wedding he’ll seek Ryssand out.”

“Leaving his niece unwatched, and no presence in court?” Idrys said. “No, my lord king. I very much doubt it.”

His Reverence of Amefel, meanwhile, being an old man, had had a taking, a serious crisis of health—Idrys swore his innocence. But His Reverence had had a falling spell, and retired into an apartment within the Quinaltine, spending his time between his bed, his privy, and his prayers for his benighted province.

The controversy and the division was by no means healed. Efanor himself had argued vehemently with Ryssand’s priest at a most uncomfortable state dinner, a mincing of doctrine and dogma at that table that Cefwyn hoped not to see repeated. There was no profit in it, none: neither Efanor nor the priest emerged converted, the damned petticoats figured in the issue, and everyone’s digestion suffered.

“Silence this damned doctrinal nonsense!” Cefwyn had insisted to the Holy Father’s face, utterly out of patience, and the result, the very next morning, was a hesitant, rambling homily from the Holy Father on the subject of unity in the state, a discourse that made no sense, seeming to court all sides… a parable of brothers and the healing of breaches and somehow off to the rights of a father to order his family and a king to order the state and a husband his wife.

“Damned useless,” Cefwyn said to Idrys in his apartments after services. “Is this his word against that damned priest wandering the taverns? He’s a father and that priest—what’s his name—is some errant son? Or a wife? Fetch me Sulriggan. No, tell Sulriggan bring His Holiness and I’ll talk to him. Good gods, can’t the man come to a point, say yea or nay, not both in the same sermon?”

“And what more is my lord king, but yea and nay regarding this priest that’s preaching sedition? I still advise my lord—”

“Dead priests are trouble, master crow, of a sort even you stick at, don’t deny it. Now the patriarch of Amefel’s taken residency in the Quinaltine, where you can’t reach him, save his bad stomach.”

“Unhappy man,” said Idrys, long-faced. “And holy men have been known to vanish. It’s a known aspect of holiness.”

“For shame.”

“For a long reign, my lord king. I’ll be far plainer than His Holiness. Kill this priest.”

Cefwyn looked long and soberly at his Lord Commander, saying to himself he had just asked for the hard truth, asking himself whether he was not a fool for sticking at this one deft, swift act, that might, in fact, save other lives.

But there was, beyond his own scruples against murder, the prospect of outright disaster in any miscarriage of Idrys’ proposal.

“I have observed this priest meet with those who meet with Murandys and Ryssand,” Idrys said. “Often. I’m not sure there’s a content beyond the offices of priests, but the fact remains: this priest has their patronage, and if messages do flow between Ryssand and Murandys to which we have no access, there is a conduit for them. The man’s no dullard, no wide-eyed believer, and he has far too sleek a look for a man that sleeps in hedgerows.”

“You have suspicions of Ryssand, do you? Is he playing two games?”

“Oh, of suspicions of Lord Corswyndam I have full store and several wagons over; of substance, there is only that one priest I know has his ear, and the ears of a half a score of the barefoot and hair-shirt sort, the ones who plague the streets. But what this one might sing if I laid hand to him could be valuable. If we can come at Ryssand that way, His Highness needn’t marry to rein Ryssand in. If we can find a cause to shorten Ryssand by a head—gain to the whole kingdom.”

It was a tempting thought. But he dared not. Would not. “I am not my grandfather. And, gods, if something went wrong—”

“Your grandfather lived to die in bed, his son with two sons and the kingdom secure. I ask instead of acting because I will not trample on policy. I serve my king; I beg to serve him well.”

Idrys chided him and provoked him humorously on many things. This time there was no humor, no mask. “You’re saying I’m a fool to let Ryssand live. What need to justify it, if I were my grandfather?”

“I say if Ryssand had died before this, you’d have no priest stirring up resentments in the populace. Now, lo! the priest. If my lord king fears to become his grandfather, let him remember his royal father failed to be rid of Heryn Aswydd, and look how that tree grew.”

It was not a pleasant memory. Idrys was telling him what was the more prudent course. Profitable if Efanor could somehow convert Ryssand’s interests to the Crown’s interests, for Ryssand’s talents and resources were formidable; but that still left him with Ryssand for company, and Ryssand’s narrow doctrine to battle for all the years of his reign… while he hoped to settle a lasting peace with Ninévrisë’s kingdom. The Elwynim would never become Quinalt, and it was a far leap to think he could bring Ryssand away from his doctrinist allies, on that score. When he looked that far, he saw all manner of trouble.

But that was far, far downstream from where they stood.

“If I do this,” he said, “we risk dividing Ylesuin. We risk years of unrest. We risk making a holy martyr, in this priest, and that is nothing we can sweep away. My grandfather, with all his faults, avoided martyrs.”

“What to do is Your Majesty’s concern. How, I consider is mine. But the harm grows, day by day.”

“Ryssand’s no easy horse to ride. There’s no one I could set in that saddle but Lord Ryssand, precisely because he is a narrow, provincial doctrinist like every other man in Ryssand. I’ve thought about my choices. I detest the man. We’re well rid of that son of his. But what do I set in his place, if not my brother, gods help him! And I’ll postpone that day at least until there is a wedding.”

“Disarm him of this priest.”

“If not this one, there’ll be another one.”

“Oh, aye, my lord king, and if we down one of Tasmôrden’s men, there’ll be another. Shall we forbear to fight Tasmôrden?”

“You know it’s not the same.”

“Be rid of this one. And the next. And the next. Eventually there will be a dearth of Ryssandish priests.”

“And enough anger to breed there and fester. Words deal best with words.”

“Ah. Another of the Holy Father’s sermons?”

He let go a breath, beaten down by the mere memory of tedium and indirection.

“Give me leave,” Idrys said briskly. “And the matter is done by evening.”

“And the town stirred up to a froth.”

“A lack of a priest isn’t noisy.”

It was ever so tempting: his piety, such as it was, halfway argued him toward it, as the safest course for the peace, and all the lives he held in his hands. But he had Luriel’s public show approaching, on which there would be crowds, tinder for a spark, and that rode his thoughts, inescapable.

“I want the town quiet. I want Luriel safely wedded and bedded and no untoward event to undo that alliance. When Murandys has Panys for a bedfellow, and we have Panys reporting to us… then we can consider measures.”

“I fear I’ve not told you everything, my lord king.”

Cefwyn drew a lengthy breath and sank, somewhat, against the back of his chair, Idrys black-armored and seeming by now like an implacable fixture of his office. “Sit, damn you, crow. My neck aches from looking at you. What morsel have you saved for dessert?”

“Cuthan, my lord king.” Idrys reluctantly settled his black-armored body onto a frail, brocaded chair. “The priest is a straightforward matter. Lord Cuthan, I fear, is not.”

“Cuthan.”

“Your Majesty may remember him… the one Tristen exiled, that vain old scoundrel…”

“Out on it! I know who Cuthan is and where he was and where his cursed ancestors slept, in their own beds and out! I know Tristen exiled him, and I know he’s in Elwynor.”

“He is not in Elwynor, my lord king.”

“Where, then? Dare I guess?”

“Ryssand?”

“Damn.”

“Ryssand is honest in one thing,” Idrys said, “that he bears a father’s grief for a son and heir. That, marriage with His Highness or no, he will never relinquish… not greed, not ambition, not the promise that his line might weave itself into the Marhanens can ever erase the matter of his son.”

“His one virtue and more inconvenient than his sins. Now he has Cuthan. And Parsynan. What a merry court!”

“I’ve not told His Highness yet. What I wonder is how he passed through all of Elwynor and its weather and all the way to Ryssand.”

“A rowboat. We’re not speaking of a regiment.”

“Yet my lord king knows the man is old, in no robust health. How did he bear the snow, the ice, the pillaging army, if nothing else? A very hardy man, or a very lucky, if he did that alone.”

“Damn. Twice damn. Tasmôrden!”

“Exactly so. I fear Cuthan may be very close to Tasmôrden. He may bear a message, or gather one.”

All of a sudden the depth of Idrys’ knowledge suggested a fearsomely deep involvement in Ryssand, volatile as it was, dangerous as the spying was—and fruitful as it proved.

“How did you learn this?”

“Efanor’s messenger.”

“Efanor’s messenger. Crow, it’s my brother’s name, his reputation… his safety, for that matter—”

Idrys, rarely abashed, looked at him with a half-veiled effrontery, defense in every line. “Your Majesty, you once asked whom I served, your father, or you. And where there was a choice of loyalties, your father is in his tomb, and I have only one lord, as does His Highness.”

“So you insinuated a spy into Ryssand, a spy wearing my brother’s colors.”

“Briefly.”

“Do you know the furor if he were found? Efanor is honorable to a fault!”

“Very much to a fault. My lord king, but some risks are worth taking, and spies within Ryssand are hard come by.”

“Wearing my brother’s crest, good loving gods… I’d like to know where else you have them.— No! Don’t tell me! I’ve become worse at lying than Tristen is.”

“I fear you were never good at it. It’s Tristen who’s become adept in the art.”

He was not certain for a moment it was no jest. But Idrys’ expression advised him the matter was serious.

“You don’t fault him,” Cefwyn said. There seemed a fist still clenched about his heart. “You don’t tell me he’s deceived me. This is my friend, damn you! You’ve spoken against him before, and you’ve been wrong.”

Idrys gave a rare and rueful laugh. “Lord Tristen is extremely canny about disposing my spies at distance from him. As a result, I have not a single man in Henas’amef. He’s sent them all to the river, beginning with Anwyll. I have better intelligence of Ryssand than of His Grace of Amefel.”

“And what do your spies learn, beyond his sins at Althalen and his wall-building?”

“His fortification of the province? His permissions to the witches to flourish? His countenancing of Sihhë emblems, spells and charms openly displayed in the market?” Idrys held up fingers and ticked off the points, one by one. “His banishment of Guelen Guard, his appropriation of Your Majesty’s carts and drivers, his holding of Parsynan’s goods in consequence—” Idrys began the tally on the left hand. “His alienation of the Amefin patriarch, his banishment of an Amefin earl old as the hills in his title…”

“All these things he confesses. Justify your spies, master crow. I defy you to report to me one thing Tristen hasn’t freely owned.”

“He’s holding winterfeast and invited all the lords of the south to come and camp under arms, for, one suspects, some use besides a winter hunt. The preparation is for a host as many as took the field at Lewenbrook.”

He forgot to breathe.

It was, on the other hand, exactly the sort of feckless doing he could always expect of Tristen—and it was not aimed at him. There was nothing of Ryssand’s poison in what Tristen did. Rather it was Tristen’s doing what his king could not do… and so secretly it had taken Idrys this long to know it.

“He’s doing what I did this summer. He’s gathering his allies about him, people he well likes… men who like him. He’s reknitting the damned southern alliance, is what he’s doing… and gods save him for the effort! What I can’t, he does, and I wish him success. I wish him every success.”

“But it will provoke just a small bit of comment among the northern barons, will it not? He’s told Anwyll prepare a landing for boats bearing grain. An immense amount of grain, out of Casmyndan.”

“He’s importing grain? I had to show him the use of a penny this autumn, for the gods’ good sake.”

“Well, and made him lord of Amefel, my lord king, which I do recall counseling you was a—”

“You agreed it was a good idea.”

“I agreed he would be a most uncommon lord of Amefel, and perhaps it was a safe direction for him, considering the Elwynim prophecy.”

“Damn the Elwynim prophecy! If he wants to be king in Amefel, between the two of us—” He drew a deep breath, his heart still laboring from the realization of new complications in all his plans. “Between the two of us and the walls, master crow, if he would be High King at Althalen and rule the damn province between me and Nevris’ kingdom, I’d grant it. The Aswydds styled themselves aethelings.”

“So does he.”

“When?”

“That the first night, in the oath of Crissand of Meiden, my lord king, who is also Aswydd, may I say? And who swore to him as aetheling. And may I say that that small rumor is starting to make the rounds of the taverns? The word came out of Amefel, I daresay.”

“Like Cuthan.”

“Never forgetting that now troublesome man. And now Ryssand’s priest knows.”

“Damn this zealot priest—what is his name?”

“Udryn, my lord king. Chief of them, at least. And while Your Majesty has a very sensible desire to have the Lady Luriel’s wedding without incident—very many rumors may begin to make the same rounds, from the same lips, from the same source. Do you still bid me refrain from this priest?”

“I want none of his crowd creating a commotion at the wedding. No. No blood. Just keep that priest out of the way. That’s all I ask. If the Holy Father can’t rein him in… see to him. Frighten him. That’s the best course. And don’t let him know who’s done it.”

Idrys accepted that thrown stone without a ripple. “Will Your Majesty still wish, then, to see His Holiness today? Or Sulriggan?”

“No. I don’t need indigestion. But I’ll do something, perhaps, to uphold His Holiness.”

“A wedding largesse… that might serve.”

“And on the day of the wedding, for the hour after. Make preparations, noisy preparations, all for the Wintertide, and a wedding feast in the square. Gods give us good weather. That will sweeten the mood in the town. Hard to make converts against a feast and free ale. Particularly if that zealot priest is too scared to show his face.”

“Dancing in the square, all the merry townsfolk.” No more unlikely proponent of festivities ever arranged a ball. “I’ll have the Guard drawn up, martial display. They will be there, and the weapons will not be the parade issue. A royal decree to make merry and a proclamation from His Holiness to sanctify the wedding. Then a royal gift.”

“A penny a head. No, two. Make them say, Gods bless His Holiness, and give them the pennies, as from him. Gods! To think I should be doing this to bolster the old fox.”

“And your former—”

“Never say it! And for the gods’ sake don’t make any noise about this Udryn.”

“For the gods’ sake?” Idrys asked with irony. “Perhaps. Certainly for the kingdom’s sake. And a greater reward you could never give His Holiness.”

Chapter 3

The doors in Henas’amef were hung with winter garlands and the shrines in the Zeide’s East Court were festooned with evergreen and berries, with every manner of garland and banner, in anticipation of Midwinter Day and the turn of the world toward spring.

For the duke of Amefel the tailor brought forth splendid clothing, red, with black eagles on the sleeves; and a warm cloak with the arms of Amefel worked on it. It was wonderful new wool, kind as an embrace in the winter wind. Tassand and the tailor had insisted, for their own pride, to see he did not go to a new year in old clothes. There was magic implicit in that choice, and he agreed with it in all its meaning.

Still the weather held fair. It was cold enough to sting faces, but not a bitter cold.

Ale flowed with particular good cheer all over town, so the staff reported, and the two youngest of Tristen’s servants came back from town late, and in disgrace. The taverns were hung with lights and kept their doors open all night.

Pack-ponies went out the gates of Henas’amef heavy-laden with supplies for Anwyll, who was doomed to the watch by the river for the festive season: it was on Tristen’s order they sent him a special load of ale.

Another train of mules kept continual rounds between Henas’amef and the river and between Henas’amef and the winter camp at Althalen, where more and more of Auld Syes’ sparrows came. The mules brought special supplies, sweets, for the Elwynim, the same as the Amefin, hallowed Midwinter Day.

But beneath the cheer of the festal season, and despite the new clothes and the well-wishes, Tristen worried, for there was no sign yet of grain or boats. Especially in the evenings he watched the main gate from the windows where his pigeons gathered. Noting this congress of pigeons, some of the house servants said the birds were his spies, but this was never so, and his birds brought him nothing but comfort—never a hint of the passage of boats or of any other sort of transport that might bring him guests or grain.

What would be the outcome if he had made all this preparation and only Cevulirn returned?

So he wished, and he wished for days, all but in despair, and Uwen’s best wishes could lend him no assurance.

But one morning that he waked after a deep, peaceful sleep, he faced the windows early and with a joyous, inexplicable confidence.

He said no more to Uwen than that he had a hope this morning; and Uwen cast an eye to the banners cracking and straining at their poles, and said with that good south wind he had the same.

For the next three days after the wind blew from the south, so strong and so constant it might even melt the snow across the river… so Tristen began to fear, and he sent word to Anwyll not to let down his watchfulness a moment during the holiday.

But on that wind, he believed the boats were coming. Olmern was on the wing. His pigeons flew out to the north on the third day, and returned at evening, noisy on the ledge, all accounted for, but not so hungry as he would expect.

Paisi came in the same hour, announcing that master Emuin would attend in hall the Midwinter celebrations, and begged Tassand’s assistance to make his robes presentable.

There were travelers on the road as well as on the water. Tristen became convinced of it… distracted while Tassand complained that whatever master Emuin had spilled on his gray robe would not come out, and he must call on the tailor, who was busy with other holiday requests, and at his wits’ end, and might he afford the tailor an extra coin for the effort?

Cook had more preparations now than a general contemplating battle, for an arrival Tristen assured her was coming precisely on the day.

There were the tables in the stable-court, well to the side of the stables, where staff and servants would hold their feast, in a tent set up for the purpose, with torches set up to light the premises. There was the table in the South Court that would be spread for the notables of the town, aside from those high lords and guests the great hall would accommodate.

The hams, the preserved meats, all these things laid by since fall, came out to be decorated; so did the stored apples and nuts and spices. There were partridge pies. The whole west wing smelled of baking apples and spice cakes.

Tristen bade Tassand advise the lords to expect a Midwinter Eve banquet as well as on Midwinter Day, for as he had dreamed of white-sailed boats coming to Anwyll’s camp, now he dreamed of Modeyneth and Trys Ceyl, and of camps more distant, all with weather blessed with the south wind and not a hint of snow or hindrance. Emuin had foretold Midwinter Eve as full of chance, fearsome and dark, but now the prospect was of wishes fulfilled.

On the afternoon of Midwinter Eve, indeed, while the sun was still high, the bell at the town’s South Gate announced arrivals—and shortly thereafter the courtyard erupted in brawling confusion, horsemen and banners of not one but two lords, Umanon and Sovrag, who had arrived both from the riverside and down that short northern road from the guard stations.

Their arrival was the fulfillment of a promise. Their arrival together was a marvel, and the fact that they had traveled together was a miracle. Neither lord had liked the other. Yet here they were, and Tristen stood amid the din of yapping dogs and shouting stablehands to welcome them in great relief.

There were never in Ylesuin two more opposite men… even a wizard’s Shaping knew how very little likely they were ever to admire one another. Umanon was Guelen, Quinalt, proper and lordly, fastidious with his person, and Sovrag of Olmern was a stout old river pirate lightly glossed with nobility—king Ináreddrin having found it easier to ennoble him than to ferret him out of his river-cliff stronghold.

Umanon, having just precedence over Sovrag in any courtly encounter, hung back frowning and amazed at Sovrag swaggering ahead to meet his host with open arms and a broad grin on his red-bearded face.

“Well, well-done, lad,” Sovrag declared, clapping Tristen fiercely about the shoulders. “Lord of Amefel! Gods damn, I said to myself when I had the horse-lord’s letter that the Marhanen had a rare good sense, damn but he does!” Sovrag stood back then, ceasing his friendly battering in favor of a broad, estimating view of him. “And a far better neighbor ye’ll be to us all than lord thievin’ Heryn Aswydd or his sisters ever could be, an’ by this beginnin’, a good customer, too. I asked His Grace here“—this with a nod back to Umanon—”I said as he was supplyin’ the grain, he might as well come on the river and have a look at the far shore hisself. As I might say, your grain is all safe at the landin’ with that Guelen captain, who I trust’ll get it moved to some right place, wherever ye wish it.”

“He’ll manage,” Tristen said, having all confidence in Anwyll’s resourcefulness.

In truth, he had expected to feel great pleasure at the sight of familiar faces, but Sovrag’s assault was not within his plans, and his heart widened dangerously in the honest joy of that friendly embrace.

Yet he feared the disaffection of the silent man in the meeting. If Sovrag had never been his enemy and had never dealt coldly with him, he could not say the same for Umanon, who, being Quinalt, was least likely of all the lords to approve of a wizard’s Shaping. He had somewhat doubted Umanon would come. He had thought Sovrag might go to the south for grain rather than to Imor’s ample warehouses, for one thing because Umanon supplied Cefwyn, and might not have grain to spare from that army’s needs—and for the other, because Umanon would never trust Sovrag.

Yet Umanon had come with the grain. And on boats, not the heavy horses that were the pride of Imor. Umanon had, therefore, a share of Lord Heryn’s gold dinnerplates… he did hope it was a fair one.

With all that in mind he resolutely braved Umanon’s icy calm and dared a warm welcome and a reach toward Umanon’s hand. “Thank you for coming, sir. Thank you ever so much.”

“Lord of Amefel,” Umanon said, distant as ever, but pleasant, amazingly so. In fact Umanon had a far different expression toward him than he had ever had, not so much that the face changed, but that the eyes lacked hostility and the hand that met his had no coldness at all.

“Welcome. Very welcome, sir.” He found he had no idea quite what to do with Umanon, or how to keep him in this good pleasure, but he had learned at Lewenbrook that this was a brave, hard-fighting lord, if a prickly and difficult one; and well-begun with him secured all the rest.

“A bold choice on His Majesty’s part, your appointment,” Umanon said. “I take it there are northern noses sorely out of joint.”

“Very much so, I fear.”

“And this moving of grain? What’s the purpose here? To finish the business we left unfinished this summer?”

“Aye,” said Sovrag, having followed on Tristen’s heels. “Cevulirn’s man had no great store of news, and your man out riverside’s no better. But partridge pies was a lure good as gold, well, close on it, and here we are. There’d better be those pies. I promised me lads there’ll be pies.”

“There will be,” Tristen said. “Cook says so. Master Haman! Take the horses!” The horses on which Sovrag and Umanon had ridden in had Imorim and Olmern emblems on their tack, no mark of Anwyll’s company. And how they had gotten them upriver on boats he could not imagine. More, they were handsome, well-groomed animals, having no signs of a hard passage. He was quite amazed, and thought of large barges, as if the thought had Unfolded to him, Boats such as he had never quite imagined.

“And our answer?” Umanon asked. “Is it to Ilefínian, then?”

“Sir, before we say much, I think we should have all of us at once. But you do know Ilefínian’s fallen.”

“That news indeed traveled,” said Umanon, and Sovrag:

“I said we’d pay for not goin’ on across last summer, didn’t I say it?”

“Many of us said it,” said Umanon, and then, dryly: “Our grain is in this Olmernman’s boats, to which I have tally sheets, fair written, and signed to, and in my possession.”

As if the grain coming from Umanon might somehow become confused with the tally coming from Olmern’s warehouses. Tristen would not have understood that possibility so long ago, but he knew it now, having dealt with Parsynan’s accounts, and saw Sovrag’s wicked grin.

“Enough grain for an army,” Sovrag said, “twixt his warehouses an’ mine.”

“I’ve men on the way,” Umanon said, “heavy horse. I took Cevulirn at his word; my escort is large.”

“An’ my boats,” Sovrag said, “an’ my men with all their war gear. Are we goin’ deep into Elwynor? Is that the game? Or do we sail to the northern bridges?”

Cefwyn had found it hard to contain Sovrag’s disposition to bluntness. Tristen foresaw no less difficulty. But there was no one, in hearing who was not aware of this gathering of forces, even down to the stableboys busy gathering up the horses, and that Cefwyn was preparing in the north.

“The question is what Tasmôrden may do when he learns boats have come,” Tristen said, “and since you’ve come, and we have supplies, his choices are more limited.”

“I asked had you indeed taken counsel of His Majesty in our gathering,” said Umanon, equally blunt, and straight back to Sovrag’s question about the north. “Ivanor’s messenger professed not to know that answer.”

“I’ve not yet advised the north,” Tristen said with utter candor, “and I was never sure till now whether I could gather everyone. He’s given me leave to build, and to fortify, and that I’ve done, so Tasmôrden won’t cross the river southward. But here and now, sir, nothing against the king’s welfare, sir, ever. The northern barons have objected to my being here, they’ve raised accusations against Her Grace, and the last man I sent to Guelessar with a message went in fear of his life, going there and bringing back Cefwyn’s message. Idrys watched over him, and even that wasn’t enough. It’s not safe to send. I’m not sure Cefwyn is safe.”

That brought a worried frown to both lords.

“At dinner tonight, when the others come, then I’ll tell you what I know besides,” Tristen said. “I’ve asked you here for your advice, among other things.”

“By way of advice,” said Umanon, “wise to move sooner rather than later, considering the temptation of all that grain, not to mention the boats.”

“Which I’ll wager already ain’t stayed at Anwyll’s crossin’, beyond the night,” Sovrag said. “Is that right, Sihhë-lord?”

“He’s to move it behind the Modeyneth wall. Modeyneth’s to send men, to carry it on their backs if nothing else.”

“Drays are coming with our heavy gear,” Umanon said.

“And the boats is off south,” Sovrag said, “quick as they set their cargoes ashore, and back after more grain, supposin’ Marna stays passable. Hooo, such a place as that woods has become.”

“Is it different?” Tristen asked.

“Unsavory,” was Umanon’s succinct answer. “A place I was glad to go through by day. All that passage, there was no breath of wind on the river, yet we saw the treetops bend. We heard voices in the woods, the sounds of a battle, but no sight of anyone.”

“Them old trees,” said Sovrag, “is sadder an’ lonelier than they ever looked in Mauryl’s day. Haunted, if ever a place was.”

“Even before Lewenbrook,” Tristen said, “it was haunted.”

He had not ventured into that part of his lands, not in the gray space and not in the world. He was sad to know that it had gone darker than his fond memories of it under Mauryl’s rule… it had frightened him, then, too, but that had been a moderate fear, a friendly haunt to him, much as Sovrag had treated it with casual familiarity in all his trade with Mauryl and never professed to fear it.

But now Sovrag gave a different report—and still came. He valued Sovrag of Olmern, for the courage he had, and found new respect for Lord Umanon, who had dared it in coming with him.

“I wish them safe passage,” he said. “And I’ve lodgings ready for you, west or east or south, whatever your preference of windows, since you’re the first here. The west, above the kitchens, is warmest.”

“The south, for the clean good wind,” Sovrag said, and Umanon: “The east, for the morning sun.”

He had looked to dispose these two men at opposite ends of the fortress, but if they had shared the boats and the river, there was surely no fear of quarrels breaking out among, their bodyguards. They went up the stairs and down the inner hall together, asking news of Cefwyn’s court, and asking what he knew, and most of all what things were coming to when the Lord Commander himself had to protect a messenger.

The halls echoed back things that had been secrets and servants paused, respectful of lordly visitors, wide-eyed at what they heard: Tristen did not miss the fact. But Sovrag had come: there would be few more secrets in Henas’amef with him here, and certainly there was no more secrecy for what would gather in the fields and pastures beyond the walls.

An army was on the move, and Tasmôrden, if he reached out to have the grain, would find that out to his peril; but learn it soon?

Beyond a doubt he would.

It was not the last arrival of the day: for before Sovrag’s and Umanon’s horses were sorted out in the stable, the bell rang again at the town gate, reporting more travelers in the distance, this time on the western approach.

The banner they flew, a rider informed them, was the Heron banner of Pelumer of Lanfarnesse; but it was no great number of men.

They had provided for five hundred men, as Cevulirn had said he would ask of each lord. But Pelumer at last came riding in under the West Gate of the Zeide, lord and men alike in modest gray and green, he came with only his banner-bearer and eight of his house guard.

They were likely rangers, these men, riding horses, as they did not when they fought… Pelumer’s was a foot contingent, far more comfortable in deep forest, even daring Marna’s edge… and on that thought, Tristen did not give up hope of Pelumer.

“Welcome,” he said.

“Ah,” Pelumer said as he stepped down and cast a glance to the banners in evidence, two lordly banners flying in equal honor with the Eagle of Amefel above the curtain wall. “Olmern and Imor.”

“Your own banner to join them, sir, and be welcome, as you were in the summer.”

“Good news out of Amefel, after a great deal of bad. I’ve watched this business since summer in no good heart. I was glad to hear the call. I have wagons, with the winterage of a company of a hundred, and other men disposed on various byways among the villages. My rangers know the intrusions to the west, and the gathering at Althalen, not spying, I trust you’ll know, but being aware you have forces there, sir, being aware is all.”

A hundred men, not five. Lanfarnesse fielded few men, and despite all assurances managed never to fight in the field.

What Lanfarnesse knew before any battle, however, might pay for all, and though Pelumer had fallen out of the favor he had once enjoyed with Cefwyn, perhaps, Tristen thought, his heart beating more quickly—perhaps these elusive few men never belonged on a battlefield.

“At Althalen,” Tristen said, “Elwynim have settled, and we supply them. But you know that, too.”

“Ah,” Pelumer said as if he were surprised. He turned evasive the moment anyone asked him his men’s doings, and that had repeatedly angered Cefwyn, to the point their alliance was in jeopardy.

But these were not heavily armored men who fought in the Guelen way.

“Settle your men where you will, sir. At Althalen or here, or any lands between.”‘

That did catch a glance, a second, even alarmed assessment.

“Where you will,” Tristen repeated. “For their best service to us.”

“I take you at your word,” Pelumer said, and earnestly so. In his youth Pelumer had been first to the taking of Althalen, Tristen recalled, and forever after had the right of precedence over all the lords of Ylesuin, north or south. Selwyn Marhanen had valued him… but Ináreddrin and Cefwyn, steeped in the Guelen way of war, had ordered him.

“I need you,” Tristen said from the depths of his heart. “Welcome, Lord Pelumer.”

“Amefel,” Pelumer said with uncommon warmth, and clasped his hand in both of his. “Well, well, we’re here with our finery, for a feast. Where shall we lodge?”

“Olmern is south and Imor is east. The west is free, and warmest. Come, if you will. I’ll bring you there.”

Pelumer had wounded him once, when he had overheard how Pelumer spoke of him, and then was friendly to his face. But Pelumer went in gray and green through a forest; he had no less skill to put on the right face with every man: so Tristen saw, and forgave him his past offense. Pelumer learned most from men who thought Pelumer was of their opinion, and what Pelumer did then was the important thing.

There were only the horses, and them, Haman’s lads attended; Pelumer himself took up the light saddle kit he brought, and ordered his banner set beside the others on the wall.

“Olmern reported the forest darker and sadder than ever,” Tristen said, as they went up the steps together, his guard and Pelumer’s easy in company and admitted to confidences. “Did you see it so?”

“Remarkable if not,” Pelumer said. “It’s very law-abiding, Marna’s verge, at least in Crown law. The bandits all are dead. We’ve found them by ones and twos, fallen in hazards sane men would avoid. A rash of bad luck, or the like. I’ll not risk my men in the heart of it. I trust it does very well by itself.”

“Do you think it does well?”

“You would know that sooner than I, if it were otherwise, would you not, sir?”

“I think I would.”

“Ghosts aplenty walk that woods. The old trees have their roots amongst far too many bones.”

A gloomy sort of converse it was, but it lent a vision of the Pelumer who had served the first Marhanen… wary now, having saved his life when many another had died, and having lived long enough to be a repository of old lore, interesting tidbits—and warnings.

“We should have crossed this summer,” Pelumer said. “So I told the king.”

It wanted only Cevulirn. And the day went on toward dark, cloudless and still.

The lords had rested since their arrival. Now they began to ready themselves for the festivities of this day of welcoming, and servants ran to and fro with buckets of hot water for baths, buckets and towels, turning the stairs treacherous. Others mopped, lest someone slip, while still other servants laid fresh fragrant evergreen along the tables in the great hall.

The musicians warmed their instruments by the fire, sending up a disordered, somehow soothing sound. One tuned a drum.

Tristen walked the circuit of the great hall with Uwen at his heels, assuring himself that everything was in order to accommodate the guests that he did have, and trying not to worry for the one yet to come. Certainly he had no need to remind Emuin of the doings in hall. Tassand had taken Emuin his festive robe, and Paisi was in and out and among the preparations downstairs in a beatific anticipation of cakes.

Tristen himself stole a morsel from a platter, and Uwen had one, too.

“Not to spoil supper,” Uwen said with a wink, “only to stave off the pangs, and make sure the ale don’t land in an empty spot. All’s ready. Be easy, m’lord.”

The timely arrivals were, as he had heard from Lord Umanon by way of Tassand, no accident: Cevulirn had prudently appointed the day before Midwinter Eve as the day by which they all should arrive… and on Cevulirn’s word these lords had set forces on the road and traveled ahead, themselves, trusting that there would be a camp, there would be stabling, there would be food and firewood and all such things as they needed without their transporting it over winter roads.

All these men had trusted him, and committed men to be encamped here in the uncertain weather. More, the men with them were separated from their homes during the festive season, either here with their lords or still out on the roads, and by Uwen’s attentive management the earliest come had their feast: the garrison set up a tent for the lords’ men the same as the festive tents for the town, and under it the garrison’s cooks prepared to serve kettles of uncommonly thick stew and baskets of bread, and kegs of ale bought from every tavern.

That was to last all through the holiday, and to repeat for every contingent to arrive. It set the men in good cheer.

And just as the sun was at its last, the gate bell rang, heralding their last, most welcome visitors.

“The White Horse!” one of Haman’s lads ran in to say, wide-eyed. “The Lord of Ivanor, and all his men!”

It was not all the men of Ivanor, but certainly a goodly number, bringing their tents on packhorses. They set to work making camp on last summer’s site even as their lord, in a fine gray cloak, and dressed fit for a lord’s hall, rode up through the town.

Cevulirn had not failed the day, after all, but had come exactly at the last of the daylight. In the dusk one of Haman’s lads set the White Horse of Ivanor in its place on the wall, and in the firelight from below the creatures of the banners tricked the eye, as if they were bespelled to life.

Crissand arrived, and Drumman and Azant, all the lords who had come to the shrines and the tombs of the East Court, and now trooped in, all in modest finery—no extravagance in these days—and met the lords of the south with open arms and honest delight.

It was the best, the most wonderful sight. Tristen came to Crissand in particular, for Crissand had ridden out to his villages and made it back again, hard riding, for this night before Midwinter Eve.

“You came,” Tristen said, and Crissand:

“I’d have ridden through drifts, my lord: as it was, I followed tracks on a fair road and fell in with Ivanor.”

The old keep rang with voices. Outside, the several courtyards were all packed with guests and their entourages going here, going there, with horses being brought uphill and down and food being sent out.

It felt as lively as it had felt in the summer… but then had been days of dust and sweat. Now the nip of winter was still potent enough at night to sting cheeks of arriving guests to ruddy color.

And the smell of spices, rich meats and bread baking wafted through the gathering, while the pungent scent of juniper fought that of horses and leather and wool… all these things were in the air when Cevulirn, arriving last in the hall, accepted the embrace of brother lords, both Amefin and otherwise.

“We are all here,” Tristen said, and felt something settling, solid as stone and almost as old, into place. He had his hands one on Cevulirn’s shoulder and one on Crissand’s, as he turned and faced his guests.

The gray space flared before him, a bright flash of light. We are all here, rang through the wizardous air and touched Emuin in his tower, and rang all the way to Assurnbrook.

Chapter 4

The morning of Midwinter Eve dawned pearl and pink, fit for a wedding… and that well-omened weather together with the event was a relief so great Cefwyn had difficulty to keep a silly cheerfulness from his face, even with the necessity of wearing the Crown and the royal regalia.

They were marrying off Luriel of Murandys. He wished to smile at everyone.

Most of all he smiled at his royal wife, likewise bedight in her regal finery, with the circlet crown of the Regent of Elwynor on her brow… for they had reached this day without a rift between them and in good sorts. And by his order, Ninévrisë, whose small court all attended the bride this morning, went attended not by ladies, but by the martial display of Dragon Guard, the whole power of the Crown, and a very clear statement for all witnesses both that the king held her very dear… and that she did not attend Luriel this morning.

It was for the lesser lights, the maids and matrons of the court, to be sure all the requisite things, the book of devotions, the sprig of broom, the small packet of salt, and the pinch of grain, found their way into the bride’s possession, disposed about her person in various traditions old as time.

“I’ve made her gown,” Ninévrisë had said with acerbity, in deciding not to attend the bride’s robing. “Her kin may see her into it.”

Peace had prevailed just down to the night before, so Cefwyn had heard, when Luriel had gone into a fit of temper about her shoes, which had turned out too small, despite careful measuring. Luriel’s feet hurt, and now the unfortunate shoemaker went in fear for his life and trade.

“She ate this sweet and that,” Ninévrisë said, “and she would have the shoes the finest, the daintiest when she had the measure taken, oh, no, no grace given, all advice disregarded. We heard a thousand times how all her house has dainty hands, dainty feet. Now the shoes pinch. Pray, shall I pity her, or the shoemaker?”

“Mark that man, and I’ll order a pair of boots,” Cefwyn vowed. Ninévrisë had extended the utmost of tolerance and kindness to Luriel of Murandys, and now when she should be most grateful, the bride had thrown a tantrum about the shoes and flung scissors and a sewing basket in Ninévrisë’s presence.

“Plague take Luriel,” he thought, and said. But he wished honest good fortune to the bridegroom, young Rusyn, and had sent him a prayer book, a kingly gift, and traditional for a young Quinalt groom. His friends, besides, would present him a silver dagger, and a sprig of rue, the groom’s other gifts. Young Panys would bathe in water brought in from Panys, without benefit of warming, and commit the first shavings of his beard, saved for this purpose, to a holy fire.

All these customs the groom bore with, and the pranks besides, which Rusyn was likely not spared: the king of Ylesuin at his wedding had had only a boot stuffed with stockings when he tried to put it on, Annas’ doing, he was sure… but to his disappointment no one else had ventured a wedding joke, not even his brother.

Now…

Only have us through the day, Cefwyn prayed as they went down the stairs from the royal apartments toward the lower hall. Holiday evergreen entwined the balustrades.

Midwinter Eve for a wedding night and Midwinter Day for a first morning, the night of changes and the morning of a new year… omens of ending one thing and beginning another made it not an unpopular day for weddings, and sure, there were two more to follow today in the Quinaltine, notable sons and daughters within the town and the outlying villages, which the Holy Father would also perform.

Cefwyn kept Ninévrisë’s hand in his as they descended into the gathering wedding party at the foot of the stairs—he smiled on the well-wishers, on Lord Maudyn, the father of the groom, and even on Prichwarrin Lord Murandys, who was trying to seem both cheerful and calm: the smile seemed entirely to unnerve him, and that was pleasant.

There was an exchange, stiffly formal, of courtesies and well-wishes, a small cup of fine wine all around, drunk standing, the cups a gift and a tradition of the midlands, Panys’ lands.

Then the entire party went down the outside steps and gathered up Efanor and his guards. The Lord Commander joined them, wearing his ordinary black, even for weddings.

Outside, where the processional formed, all the lords in the Guelesfort had turned out in their winter finery, ladies in wide skirts and no few of the simpler variety, in Ninévrisë’s fashion. Maidens bore juniper boughs and gave playful lashes to young gentlemen in their path, where amorous young gentlemen deliberately contrived to be: there was marriage-luck in the exchange.

Trumpets sounded thinly and a little sharp in the cold air, but the pearl and pink of the sky had given way to a bright, fair, glorious blue, and outside the iron gates of the Guelesfort and all along the way, puddles reflected that sky on scrubbed limestone pavings—at least in the aisle the guards kept safe, for the whole town had come for the festivities, the food, and the sights. Tradesmen and sweeps alike rubbed elbows—maids crowded close, to have a glimpse of the passing show. Custom had it that seeing a bride and groom was lucky… and this one, so far-famed a scandal of royalty and nobility, brought onlookers to a frenzy of excitement, waving kerchiefs through the grillwork and shouting out wishes of a sort to make a bride blush.

Those cheers rang off the high walls of the Quinaltine across the way, more fervent wishes than when their king had married a foreign bride: Cefwyn prayed Ninévrisë failed to make that comparison.

The quantity of ale flowing by now had something to do with it, surely—not an extravagance, yet, for they wanted no drunken truth affronting the peace. The penny largesse had found wild favor, so Annas had said, and the crowd now was in a giving mood. Cups spilling ale froth lifted high among the crowd as the royal banners swept by—the king and his consort must by law walk before all others. Then Efanor must follow; and only after the royal family came the bride and groom, who were honored for their day above all the lords of Ylesuin.

So they walked amid cheers and the press of the crowd, on the short precessional course that wound along the wall of the Quinaltine and around to the right, to the center of its now pigeonless steps.

Hands reached continually past the guards. Cefwyn reached out his own right hand, and Ninévrisë her left, brushing unwashed fingertips, and this brought a great surge forward, of sick folk seeking cures, of common folk seeking luck for their ventures. So they would wish to be touched by the bride and groom, as well, for good fortune and a cure for childlessness on this auspicious day.

The Quinalt doors, too, were decked out with evergreen and berries, and as they walked up into the great shrine the place was alight with hundreds of white candles and echoing with high, pure voices. The panoply of Murandys and that of Panys were both in evidence all about, the colors of both noble houses draping the altar and the rails, and wound about the columns to which the banner-bearers customarily retreated.

Cefwyn reached his place in the first row of seats with Ninévrisë and Efanor. The trumpets continued to peal as lord after lord behind them found their way into the shrine, each one with a flourish of trumpets.

Idrys joined them, privilege of the Lord Commander to slip into the first row from the side, and without ceremony: he was within the royal party. Then came the groom’s relatives, with Lord Maudyn of Panys, and the sole representatives from Murandys, Lord Prichwarrin, with young Lady Odrinian.

Above all the pageantry was the patched hole where rain no longer found an entry… not an elegant patch, but sufficient to winter weather: after the workers had risked life and limb, the Quinalt was dry and free of drafts, and the weather fair, even warmish for the season, making the air close, candle-scented, perfumed with warring perfumes, and the smell of incense which never quite left the place.

Cefwyn braced his knees back against the seat and stood, and stood, through all the filing-in. It was the tiresome protocol which dictated that, contrary to the custom of the court, in the Quinalt the king, who could not kneel, stood or sat, and since the nobles were still filing in and the king’s back was to the company, it was therefore the duty of royalty and the high nobles to stand… and stand, under the heavy royal regalia. Cefwyn’s eyes wandered, while he kept his face straight ahead. As the benches filled, the air grew warmer and the echoes changed from the hollow quaver of an empty vault to the soft muted stir of many bodies. One learned to judge, even counting the flourishes or watching the signal of the preceptor, that the benches were approaching full.

It was enough waiting. Cefwyn made his decision, and sat, and Ninévrisë sat, and Idrys and Efanor sat, and then the court, with a general rustling and sighing.

Cefwyn looked beside him, found that wonderful small smile and that dimple at the edge of Ninévrisë’s mouth that told him she was in exceedingly fine humor even yet, anxious to be through this. Beyond her, Efanor was resolute and brooding in profile, beyond Idrys’ dark-mustached visage… Efanor was thinking, perhaps, on Ryssand’s daughter and his own prospective marriage: that was reason enough for a grim, worried countenance.

He had not told Efanor yet about Cuthan, but he had moved to make a breach with Ryssand devastating, and his displeasure clear. Once Luriel was a happy bride, with a firm footing in the friendly house of Panys, let master crow fly, not of passion, but of clearheaded policy: the infamous Marhanen temper would do very foolish things in that regard; but because there was , he thought twice about everything.

Because there was Ninévrisë he did so many things more wisely this year than last… and he was not fearful of Ryssand’s doctrinist priests: he had walked the processional with his hands touching the people’s hands, unshielded, and unwilling to give up any of the tradition that brought him out among his own.

There was one less priest haranguing at tavern corners this morning. Likely no one even noticed the lack. The absence of a thing was harder to notice than its presence, and Idrys had created no stir at all. Well-done, he thought, deft and silent, and no deaths, no accusatory bodies.

Now trumpets hailed the processional of the groom. Young Rusyn marched up the aisle. Junior priests lit candles and swung censers, sending up blue-gray clouds of incense around the golden glow of the lamps. Rusyn arrived in the tail of Cefwyn’s eye, resplendent in Panys’ colors, and Lord Maudyn, back from the riverside where he had done faithful duty, was clearly aglow with pride.

The gathering applauded the groom as he took his place at the altar. A second sounding of trumpets, and now highborn young maidens came with lamps, so Cefwyn imagined without turning his head. The choir sang at their utmost range as Luriel of Murandys walked down the aisle.

But within the crowd a stunned silence fell, and almost Cefwyn did turn his head, asking himself what distressful thing might be going on.

Luriel arrived in the edge of his sight, and then he saw what everyone had seen, the ironic and unintended similarity in the two notable brides of the season. The heraldry of Ninévrisë’s house and that of Murandys were alike blue and white, and that was the inevitable similarity: no, it was the slim gown, the lack of the cursed petticoats—so that, for a moment Cefwyn saw two Ninévrisë’s.

He held a firm, angry grip on the rail in front, and thanked the gods when Luriel and Rusyn joined hands, with no ill omens, no hindrance. The trumpets sounded, the priests swung censers. The rising white smoke all but obscured the altar, which was the magical moment the Holy Father would appear through the smoke, a moment of high mystery and candlelit miracle.

But the Holy Father did not come through the smoke. The moment’s expectant silence began to fade in a crepitation of small movements, shifting of feet, then small laughter and whispers.

The trumpets sounded again. The censers swung furiously, maintaining the smoke.

There was still no Holy Father, and now the pause after the fanfare filled immediately with a murmur of consternation, and the bride and groom faltered, likewise uncertain.

Some laughed, but Cefwyn looked at Idrys, in the center of the row, and necessarily at Lord Panys and Lord Murandys and Efanor, all of whom had worried frowns. Idrys quickly signed to someone off among the columns, then turned to Cefwyn and excused his armored way past Ninévrisë in the narrow space between the benches and the rail, to reach him.

On the dais a figure hurried through the smoke, and Cefwyn turned his head as all the congregation gave a relieved laugh, thinking the Holy Father was late. But it was only a hurrying priest, who spied authority past the railing and came desperately off the platform toward the royal bench.

“The Holy Father,” the priest gasped out, “the Holy Father…”

A tumult had begun, sbme talking aloud, some trying to hush the hindmost. The bride and groom stood staring as, from confidence and security, now bodyguards began to move quickly to their lords, crowding in from the sides.

“… dead,” the priest said. “With evil things, evil things around him! And the blood… oh, the blood—”

“Stand in your places!” Lord Maudyn shouted out, that voice accustomed to ordering soldiers in battle. “Everyone stand in his place! Let no one move! The choir may sing! Sing!”

Even a king might find himself jumping at that voice; and a heartbeat more Cefwyn hesitated as the priest took off into the smoke, and priests and lay brothers ran after him. Ninévrisë was by him, in whatever danger existed in the place, and where assassination had at the highest of all priests it would surely not scruple to strike down a foreign consort at the center of the storm.

Cefwyn had no true weapon but his dagger, the ceremonial sword more show than blade. Efanor was at Ninévrisë’s other side, armed with somewhat better, at least; and Idrys shouted out orders to the Dragons, who had been halfway to their king when Maudyn’s order had halted them in confusion.

“Guardsmen! Here! Now!”

“This way!” Cefwyn shouted, seeing the rush of priests and acolytes around them, men he did not trust rushing this way and that and row after row of guests behind the nobles, and the doors open to the outside.

Immediately the Dragons came around them, curtaining them from the crowd and whatever danger might come from the outside. Cefwyn drew Ninévrisë by the hand, leaving the benches, passing the rail beyond the altar with Ninévrisë close before a second, desperate thought informed him no women went past that holy boundary.

But neither should murder pass it, and behind that rail, Cefwyn well knew, was no mystery of the faith, rather a maze of robing rooms and closets and storages, apt concealment for one assassin, but not for what he more feared, a movement of the crowd itself—passions were dry tinder in the town, and in narrow halls he had the advantage, places one could hold, places Dragon Guard shields could make a wall, and did, as Idrys shouted the order, “Stand fast! Let no one through!”

That sealed off the tumult from the great shrine, and left them that of priests within, wailing and crying, themselves smeared with blood. They were near that small room, Cefwyn knew from his own investiture, where the Holy Father robed.

Idrys and Efanor stayed with them, Idrys with sword bared, Efanor cautiously keeping his hand at his belt. Priests were taking no account they jostled the royal party as they advanced or retreated, one after another straining to see, then turning away in horror at the first glance inside.

Cefwyn was driven, the same, and elbowed his way past weeping, praying priests, still with Ninévrisë’s hand safely in his, and armored men pushing others aside.

His Holiness lay sprawled in his vestments, and if any blood was left in him, between the walls and his vestments, it was a wonder. Feathered cords were bound about the chair, run to the candle-sconce, back again to the chair as if some spider had done it, and the Sihhë star was painted in blood on the far wall.

“This is sorcery!” a priest,breathed.

“This is murder,” Idrys said sharply. “Stay to your praying, priest, and leave judgment of cowardly, murdering men to your king and the rightful authorities! Do spirits wear boots?”

Indeed, and Cefwyn saw it: there were footprints in the blood, leading out under their very feet.

“What are those cords?” a monk asked in all innocence.

Cefwyn had no need to wonder. He had seen the like holding charms in the market of Henas’amef, and dangling among the skirts of an Amefin witch, ghost, Shadow, whatever she was.

The star was for the less informed, who would not take the subtler clues the assassin had spread about like largesse.

“Dismiss the wedding party,” Cefwyn said, cudgeling his shaken wits into order. “See where the tracks lead before they’re trampled over! Efanor! Is Jormys here?”

“Yes,” Efanor said. “He’s here!”

“I appoint him to the Quinaltine for the interim and give him the Patriarch’s authority, temporal and spiritual, in the gods’ name!” He ran out of breath in the utterance of what was, always before, formula, and now was a weapon in his hands, the king’s power to appoint and dispose. “Advise him so! Set the robes on him! Meanwhile His Holiness is dead—show some reverence and cover him!”

“Gods save us, gods save us,” more than one priest kept saying, and another wailed, “It’s the gods’ judgment!”

“Gods’ wrath on fools!” Cefwyn became aware he had clenched Ninévrisë’s hand far too hard. “This is an assassin’s doing! And damned unlikely any of this gaudy display is real! There’s no sorcery here, it’s a planned assassination, and who’d hate His Holiness but those blackguard seditionists who prate their righteousness in the street! That’s the source of this!” With relief he saw Efanor appear again with his priest, Father Jormys, and seized on him, gentle, sensible Jormys signing himself in fear and distress at the horror in the room.

“Father,” Cefwyn said sharply, “take charge! I set you over the Quinaltine, as of this moment.”

“My lord king, I protest I am not worthy, or scholarly—”

“The king’s choice!” he shouted, his voice what he used on the field. “Our choice! Only the king is anointed to make that choice, and we make it, we propose and dispose with the anointment of the gods on our head, and I set my seal on you as His Holiness held the office from my grandfather’s hand.” Damn you was not auspicious, and he restrained the breath on which it rode. “Take charge, I say!”

Outcries from the sanctuary drowned the murmur from the inner halls. Wood splintered, light wood. Priceless carved screens stood behind the rail and the altar, and it was an ominous sound.

“Get back!” a soldierly voice shouted, and then Idrys:

“Push them out!”

The Guard moved, and shrieks attended, dim, in the distance of the maze as the Guard pressed intruders back and back.

“ Out of here, Your Majesty!” Idrys shouted. “Take the West Door!”

“The East!” Cefwyn contradicted his Lord Commander, fully conscious Ninévrisë was in danger in any rising, and would not leave him, not the woman who had defended her father against rebels in the hills. He felt the firm grip of her hand and took his dagger from its sheath, pressing it on her with no difficulty at all, and not a word.

Idrys had taken the order, and cleared the halls before them, all the way out into the sanctuary, where the groom’s father, Lord Maudyn, had marshaled a defense that kept the guests to one side and the sanctuary, give or take a few men lying in the aisle, secured.

“Maudyn!” Cefwyn shouted out. “Dismiss the gathering out the maindoors! Proceed in the ordinary order! Sound the trumpets!”

“Your Majesty will not go out there!”

“Sound the trumpets, I say!” The populace was apt to wild rumors enough. The trumpets would carry, gain attention, inform them their lords were taking action and authority still stood. A tide of the common and curious pressed at the doors, against the house guards of half a dozen lords of the realm, wild with speculation and fear, and no slinking of the king to his gates could deal with it. “By precedences, behind me! Take your places!”

But in that same moment the priests, at Jormys’ ill-timed direction, bore the Patriarch’s bloody body out of the sanctum and into the fore of the sanctuary, a sight that brought shrieks from no few even of the nobles, and from wild-eyed lesser priests, who shouted entreaties to the gods. Benches overturned as a score of hands handled the bloody corpse over the rail to the altar itself… where they disposed it atop the wedding colors on the altar, staining them with blood.

“When shall I be married?” Luriel cried, from the assembly of nobles, as if it were some personal affront, and burst into tears. Rusyn was with her, and she slapped away his comfort, even struck at her uncle Lord Murandys when he attempted to quiet her outburst.

“Your Majesty, the procession,” Idrys said in utter, low-voiced calm. “Now. Your Highness, if you would be so good as to combine your guard with His Majesty’s…”

“Go,” Cefwyn said, and Idrys gave his orders, rapidly and by name, telling off the lords in their order, dispersing other men to archers stationed in secure places Idrys never yet revealed, but his couriers knew.

“Clear the doors!” Cefwyn shouted, and slowly, using pikes gripped along the shafts by several hands, the Guard and bodyguards of various lords opened a gap in the press, and progressively formed a barrier of the sort the crowd was used to at functions, pikes held crosswise, hand to hand.

Cefwyn came out into daylight, affording all the Quinaltine square the sight of a crowned head and the woman beside him. Down the steps he moved, with dispatch, as hundreds pressed against the Guard’s efforts to open a corridor.

“Quickly now, Your Majesty.” It was Gwywyn, commander of the Prince’s Guard, who reached him, a good man, and a brave one, if obstinate, and having six strong men with shields. Gwywyn’s sharp voice and the press of shields cleared a wider path along their exposure to the open square.

Then the largest Quinalt bell began to toll: the whole tower rang for weddings, feasts, and calamities, for fire, for proclamations, and for deaths—but there was none of the peal of the lighter bells that should have rung out the wedding party. The sound was only the deep-voiced Passage Bell, which tolled over all the voices, death and doom, death and doom. It chilled the tumult to a shocked stillness, and what might happen toward the steps was no longer in Cefwyn’s command. He could make no more haste than Gwywyn’s men, but the nobles behind him did not press, lords and ladies whose only armor in this passage was their unshakable dignity and the expectation that no hand would touch them, no weapon withstand their rank and their rights.

In the same way Ninévrisë moved beside him, a foreigner in their midst, her noble, unhurried bearing a bulwark to his demand for room. No battlefield had ever seemed wider than that dreadful processional ground, blindly around the corner of the Quinaltine, toward the gates of the Guelesfort, shut and secure, and, he prayed the gods, handled by some officer with more than ordinary sense, for there they could be trapped outside and crushed or those gates could open and stay open a moment too long, provoking the crowd to press in. It was hallowed ground, lordly ground: the commons ordinarily would not press them hard; but there were so many, the strength bearing against the guardsmen that of men being pushed and trampled themselves by those behind. Panic surged along beside them, ran like hounds, pushed with the force of a river in flood.

The gates opened. Cefwyn swept Ninévrisë and his brother to the side where he had immediate access to the men managing the gates, and when he recognized the very last of the procession approaching the gates, with the mob surging behind, he gave the order to shut the doors.

The gates began to swing, admitted the very last with a right to be there, and a scatter of dazed commons pushed in by the press, whom the Guard swiftly swept aside and placed under arrest.

Distraught questions abounded, as noble restraint gave way… Who had done it? Was it sorcery? Was it the Elwynim?

“A sword or a dagger,” Cefwyn shouted over the din. “Sorcery at Lewen field left no blood! I’ve seen the one, and this was no sorcery, by the gods, it was not! Look inside the Quinaltine for the assassin!—Boy!” Cefwyn said, spying one of his pages near him in the press. “Fetch down my armor, to this courtyard! Now! Don’t gawk! Call any servant who crosses your path, no excuses!— Captain Gwywyn, good men to see Her Grace upstairs to my chambers and stand watch outside!”

Ninévrisë was no fool, to cling to him when the whole of his kingdom shuddered to the brink of riot; he wanted every encumbrance gone and every weapon around him. But she seized his hand for one urgent warning.

“They’ve killed a priest. What will they stick at now?”

He stopped for the moment, struck with chagrin and guilt at once… for he had struck at a priest: no one knew but Idrys, and Idrys’ men. But she accused him without knowing why the priestly authority was in ruin, and in front of the frightened, pious court, he could say nothing more than, “We’ll bring things to order. Father Jormys is in the Quinalt, and whatever else, he’s no common priest, and no fool.” Please the gods, he thought, that Jormys is not a fool. He seized on Efanor’s arm, fiercely. “Direct matters at the gate. Your guard, there. See no one passes. I’m going outside. The town needs to see its king.”

“They need him alive,” Efanor retorted fiercely, informing him this was folly; but it was the only course, folly for him or not, that might stem the riot before it swept into burning and looting and then to guardsmen dead and commons hanging. They were all safe behind an iron grill and an iron gate, but shouts and screams echoing off the walls outside informed him Idrys was in no such safety—and Cefwyn hurried, without running: a king must not run, must never run, never more than stride, he told himself all the way to the steps, where he thanked the gods a handful of guardsmen was marshaling some sort of order, sending the elderly and frail upstairs.

His pages had indeed run and, faster than he dared hope, were coming down the stairs, four of them, utterly white-faced and out of breath, with his field helmet, his sword, and the pieces of his best body armor. “Good lads! Haste!” He stripped off the ceremonial plate and chain where he stood, heedless of hazard, and by now Isin and other lords were likewise cursing confused servants and calling for their own horses and weapons for a sally out into the Quinaltine square in his support.

“Bring Danvy!” Cefwyn shouted at a page, sending him to the stables, for a horse was a way to be seen above the heads of the crowd, and Danvy had experience in crowds and battle alike. No one expected restraint from a warhorse—and no one pushed Danvy twice.

“My lord king,” his bodyguard protested his determination.

“Get your horses or walk!” He headed back down the steps, still buckling straps, surrendered his side to his pages to do the lesser buckles as stableboys began to bring their charges through, to the peril of everything in their path.

“That’s tight enough,” he said to the trembling page, reassured the boy with a clap on the shoulder, and gratefully took a plain guardsman’s shield as the quickest available. Danvy arrived, straining at a stable-hand’s lead, throwing his head, already hot-blooded from the confusion around him. Cefwyn took the reins himself, set foot in the stirrup, rose up into the saddle.

The Prince’s Guard, too, was getting to horse, and he moved through the press of nobles and bodyguards with Isin and Nelefreissan, of all unlikely others— northerners, Ryssand’s men with their household guard, all mounted and joining him. It was not the company he would have chosen, but all but a handful of his reliable men were outside holding the square. He trusted his back to them out of necessity and ascribed their offer to honor or fear: they were in as great a danger from the drunken crowd they faced. No one was safe out there.

“Open the gates and close them hard after us!” he ordered, and guardsmen afoot used main force and the threat of pikes to press the gates outward against the stubborn few drunk enough to assail the Guelesfort gates themselves.

Free and foremost, Cefwyn rode Danvy straight at the laggard townsmen in his path, his guard a hard-riding mass at his heels as townsmen scattered from the path of the horses. Around the corner of the Quinaltine wall, into the Quinaltine square, he met little to check him; but the Quinaltine steps were beset with a crowd in the wild flux of rumor and grief, clots of confused and frightened citizens. A man ran past waving scraps of cloth soaked in red, screaming, “The Holy Father’s blood! The Holy Father’s blood!”

Cefwyn swore and maneuvered through the gap, laying about him with the flat of his sword, sent three men sprawling and one reeling aside who thought he could pass Danvy’s guard and get at the bridle. Danvy stumbled over him, came up with an effort, steel-shod feet racketing on pavings as he drove to the foot of the Quinaltine steps.

There the Dragons and the portion of the Prince’s Guard and the Guelens that had stayed to hold their pike-line were sorely pressed at the Quinalt steps. The mob wanted into the shrine: the Guard forces would not have it, and blood slicked no few faces.

“Back!” Cefwyn shouted at the crowd, striking still with the flat of his blade where it was a man’s back, the edge if a man showed a weapon… he had no idea how many such, where the Guard was all but overwhelmed. “I am your king, damn you! Back away!”

“Silence there! Silence for His Majesty!” the cry went up from some few, amongst his personal guard, and with a screen of horses and their own bodies his bodyguard in their distinctive livery made the crowd give back. ‘

“Silence that racket,” Cefwyn said peevishly. His eyes stung. Smoke wafted at him, from across the square. “Quiet that bell! No one can have his wits with that din!”

“My lord king.” Idrys had come up beside him, afoot, by Danvy’s shifting hooves. “This is too great a risk.”

“There’s fire somewhere. What’s burning?”

“The Bryalt shrine,” Idrys said.

“Damn!”

There fell a sudden hush then, a sudden numbness of the air underlying the shouts, for the bell had, on a few false strokes, ceased tolling. It was as if the riot had lost its breath, and then fallen apart into individual, frightened men.

“The Holy Father was murdered,” Cefwyn cried, lifting his sword high in the brief chance that silence gave him, and using the words that would catch the attention even of the drunken and the mad. “Within the Quinalt itself, a murder! A new Patriarch sits the gods’ throne, His Highness Efanor’s priest, Jormys, a good and saintly man, who prays you all stand aside from this lunacy! The gods do not sleep, and will avenge this blasphemy, and the blasphemy of drunken men who profane this holy precinct! Stand back, I say! Stand back and be silent!”

A handful raised their voices against him, but the majority hushed them in fearful haste; and he caught the breath of a further silence.

“Jormys, I say, is the new Patriarch, whom the council of priests will confirm. And he will ferret out the murderer, among whom I expect to find traces leading to enemies of the Crown, of the peace, and of this land!”

“Death to the Elwynim!” a drunken voice shouted, as generations of Guelenmen had shouted.

“Elwynim are across the river!” Cefwyn shouted at the limit of his breath. “It’s Guelen traitors among you!” It was blood he called for and knew he did it. “Down with traitors! Gods save Ylesuin!”

“Gods save Ylesuin!” Everyone could shout that, and did, in the wildness of their fear, and kept shouting, filling up the silence so there was no more anyone could say. A priest, up on the steps, raised his arms and tried to quiet them, with some success, a situation still full of hazard.

“Gods save Ylesuin indeed,” Idrys said, at Danvy’s shoulder. The Lord Commander was blood-spattered, a fine dew on his armor and his grim face. “Go to safety. Let your guard deal with it. They’ve seen you’re not afraid, my lord king. It’s enough.”

“They’ll continue to see it,” Cefwyn said harshly, for now that terror had given way, anger rushed up hand in hand with it. They had threatened his kingdom. They had threatened, and men in the crowd had cried against the Crown and all it stood for. He would not go back and cower in the Guelesfort, waiting for the Guard to make the streets of his capital safe for him to show his face.

Idrys could not prevent him, and the persistent sting of smoke provided a goal in the confusion: it was no small fire, and if there was a siege and a burning at the other side of the square, he meant to stop it.

But when he drew near the farside he saw it was the Bryaltine shrine afire, a black-robed corpse dangling from a rope cast to the rooftree of the Bryalt shrine. Beneath the body a pile of books smoldered, all of a library in that blackened heap.

The mob, seeking foreigners in their midst, had hanged poor Father Benwyn.

Chapter 5

The lords had eaten and drunk their fill on the evening of their arrival, fallen asleep and rested late, even down in the tents, and out into the town. Tristen, too, took his time rising, advised that all his guests were asleep. For days they had struggled to reach here, and now all the lords who had been at the welcoming feast in the Lesser Hall either slept late or nursed last night’s folly behind drawn drapes.

Tristen himself fed his pigeons, and sat by the fire, and did the little directing he had to do. He could not persuade himself to sleep so late. He was jealous for every hour his guests were sleeping, unavailable to him, unprecedented anticipation, and his thoughts flitted and buzzed like bees.

The time felt auspicious, if any time had. His dream of the southern lords had come to life around him, and Emuin had not disapproved last night, rather had grown merry and cheerful. The lords had laughed together: Crissand got along famously with Cevulirn, and Pelumer and Umanon had sat talking with Sovrag despite old grudges.

Had ever he dreamed so much could go so well, when the stars were so chancy?

And even before the sun was a glimmering in the east the kitchens had gone into their ultimate frenzy before the feast, ovens hot, the smells of baking and roasting meat wafting everywhere about the yard… not a lord stirred forth except Cevulirn, down the hill to see to his horses before the sun was well up.

By noon the last stragglers had come out of their quarters, and by midafternoon, now, the smells of food were all but irresistible: Cook had prepared small loaves to fend off hunger, and that was the fare they had.

But there was good converse all the afternoon, and a small venture out to see the pastures and the campgrounds, of which all the lords more than approved.

There was a moment, standing facing those pastures, and unheard by any but the foxes and the passing hawk, when Tristen explained the situation at Modeyneth and Althalen. It was a curious place for a conference, with the horses cropping the brown winter grass and the wind blowing a brisk, dry chill.

“It’s only a village,” Tristen said. “And some make a great deal of it, and some think I’ve fulfilled some prophecy, but that’s not so, not to my thinking.” He added, honestly, “But Emuin bids me be careful.”

“Yet Your Grace is loyal to the king,” Umanon said.

“He’s my dear friend,” Tristen said. “And always will be.”

“So His Grace has us all to swear,” said Crissand. “And has us to believe His Majesty has our good at heart.”

“So he does,” said Cevulirn, “and to that I swear, too. King Cefwyn’s never been false to us, never forgotten Lewenbrook—he trusts us too much and doesn’t say so: all his attention is for the ones he can’t trust. But a true king, that he is.”

“That’s so,” Tristen said. “That’s very much so. He hasn’t time for everyone. He has to tend the things that aren’t going well.”

“Ryssand,” Crissand interjected.

“At the head of the list,” Cevulirn said. “Gods save the king.”

So they said, and so they finished their ride with the sun strongly westering, having ridden up an appetite.

Meanwhile Cook had outdone herself, and as the sky dimmed in the west, the kitchen poured forth platters of food, even enough to fill Sovrag’s belly, at least in prospect.

Then the lords made themselves scarce, and buckets of water and servants were in short supply as all the guests wanted baths and attention to their dressing. There was shouting, there were harried servants pelting this way and that and out, in one instance, to a tailor shop—but no one was late downstairs, to the processional Tassand had arranged, with trumpets and banners.

They filed into the great hall in all ceremony, and all who could possibly find an invitation and a place at table were in that processional, the benches fiercely crowded at their lower stations. Emuin came—was simply there, when before that he had missed Emuin in the line.

The piper and the drummer lost no time after the fanfares, and swung into cheerful tunes, one after the other… for there would be dancing. Tristen loved to watch it, and was especially glad to see so many ladies at the tables, all in fine cloth and wearing jewels. He knew Crissand’s mother and Durell’s pretty daughter both by sight; and he recalled the two very young girls from Merishadd who put their heads together and giggled at every turn. They seemed to want his attention, but they were only children.

“Your Grace should welcome them,” Tassand said close to his ear, helping him as Tassand had agreed to do. “Then ask the priests to pray.”

Tristen stood up somewhat abashed and looked around him; he had to wait for silence.

“I wanted you to come,” he said when there was sufficient silence. “I need all your good advice. And I’ve missed you very much. I’m glad to see you. Be welcome.”

There was applause to that. “Here’s to the Sihhë-lord!” Sovrag roared out, that word that he hoped never to hear, but there was no restraining Sovrag at all. “Gods bless ’im, say I!”

He was supposed to invite the priests. Emuin stood up, to the rescue, splendid in his new robe. Teranthine gray he wore, and he wore the Teranthine sigil, standing forth as a cleric, tonight.

“Father,” Emuin said with a wave of his hand toward the other end of the high table, where the Teranthine father and the Bryaltine abbot sat in close company. “If you’ll do the honors.”

“Delighted,” said the Teranthine, shook back his voluminous sleeves from his forearms like a workman preparing to work, and gave a prayer so rapid and so authoritative the soldiers present all but came to attention. “Gods bless this gathering,” the Teranthine concluded, passing the matter to the Bryaltine, who rose with his cup and tipped out a few drops onto the stone floor.

“Honor to the earth,” the abbot said, “honor to the dead in the passing of the year; honor to the living, in the coming of the new. A Great Year passes tonight. A new one begins. Let the good that is old continue and let the rest perish. Gods save the lord of Amefel.”

It pleased some: Tristen thought it should please him, but he was less certain about the matter of perishing… and if ever there should be a moment the gray space should come alive, on this night, with these two honest priests and Emuin, now it should… but it failed without the flicker of a presence, not even Emuin’s closely held one.

And what should he do now? Tristen asked himself, for there was a ritual aspect to this feast, this gathering of close friends—as if Men wished to be sure where all they loved was when the world changed. And was that enough, and had they raised enough godliness in this gathering?

But just then the servants paraded out with another course, the fabled pies, so there was an end to the speeches and the gods-blessing and all speculation on the new year. There was laughter, and Midwinter Eve, that had loomed so ominous through Emuin’s year, turned to high good spirits and the praise of Cook’s pastries.

Midwinter Eve had been imagining, and planning, all these things… and now the very night assumed a solidity and a scent and a sound all around him: it progressed, and the famous pies which, baked over the last sevenday, came out steaming, in great abundance. There was course after course besides, and music and laughter. There was nothing terrible, nothing to dread. Friends were like armor about the heart, and nothing could daunt him.

Then Sovrag called out that a good Midwinter Eve wanted tale-telling, and he had heard of the business with Ryssand’s son, but he wanted a full recitation for the wider hall.

A small silence fell—Sovrag was several cups past sober and meant no harm at all, but it was no good story, and Cevulirn, with that still, dignified calm that hushed all around him, refused.

“It’s too recent, and I’d rather Lord Pelumer. He has a winter story.”

“Which?” asked Pelumer.

“Why, when you were young, Lanfarnesse. The deer in the treetops.”

That caught interest even from the drunken, and Pelumer needed no pleading. He told of the year the Lenúalim froze so deep carts could cross it, and how the ice had lasted into spring. He told how the snow had drifted so high up the trees the deer browsed the high branches.

Then it was so cold a man carrying wood had his fingers break off, and it was so cold an ox team turned up frozen in their yoke, still standing.

Tristen thought that part very sad.

“A man could walk to Elwynor from here,” Pelumer went on, “since the river was a highroad, white and smooth as glass. I saw it. I was a boy of seven years, and I walked from Lanfarnesse into Marna and back, chasing the deer and seeing what I could see. Marna was all asparkle with ice. The High King sat in Althalen, and the High King’s rangers kept the woods. But no one dared kill the deer in Marna Wood. And no one went to Mauryl’s tower, either.

“Yet I saw it through the trees, and knew then how far I’d come. I turned back, walking the river home, not wishing even in those days to have the sun set before I’d cleared that part of those woods. Down and down went the sun, and the ice went from bright to gray. Then I walked as fast as I could, and began to run, with the clearest notion there was something right at my shoulders. I ran and I ran and I ran, until a shadow rose up right in front of me.

“It was a King’s Ranger,” Pelumer concluded, to the relief of the young girls from Merishadd, who had leaned closer and closer together, and all but jumped. “And he said it was very well I never looked back, for those who did never came out again.”

There were delicious shivers. But Tristen knew better, and so did Sovrag, surely, who leaned back in his chair, and began his own tale of river-faring, less eloquent than Pelumer, involving his own first trip up to Marna, with his father’s crew, even then trading with Mauryl.

“We went to the old tower, right up where the water meets the stones, and the old man’d come and never bargain, but say what he’d pay. That was his habit. And me da was careful about the hour, that’s so. By sundown we cleared that wood—and was raidin’ the shore by Lanfarnesse after that…” This with a wink at Pelumer. “But we’re honest men, now, an’ sittin’ in a warm hall, with clear water an’ the wind turned out of the north this evenin’. That’s the breath of the hoary old north wind, as blows the boats home. Mother South Wind, she’s blowed us here, and old man North Wind, he’s chasin’ us home—can’t ask for better. Wizard-luck, that is for us, ’specially if it blows us back with the next load.”

“Wizard-luck, indeed,” Emuin said somberly, from Tristen’s right, next Crissand at the table. “Luck and wizardry.”

“Was it you?” Sovrag asked—respecting the cloth and the wizard, as it seemed, for there was a caution in Sovrag whenever he spoke to Emuin. “Uncommon lack o’ snow, there is.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Emuin said, not the admission Sovrag courted, and it left Sovrag with not a thing to say on that subject. Tristen took quick note of the tactic, seeing it turned on someone other than him.

But Sovrag was rarely without something to say. “An’ no ice in the river, master wizard, not this year. Boats, boats can run free an’ bad luck to Tasmôrden, say I! Here’s to wizard-luck an’ Ilefínian—an’ to hell with that blackguard Tasmôrden!”

“So’t is!” Uwen said, from Tristen’s left. “But there’s tomorrow for that.” It was a valiant effort for a shy man to speak out and stem the flood of war talk— but his effort failed, for Lord Durell was drunk enough to propose they should make a foray against the enemy immediately.

“Deck the bridge at the Guelen camp and have the blackguard’s head within the week!” Durell cried, lifting his cup. “To hell with ’im!”

“I doubt it will be so easy,” Cevulirn said.

And Crissand, who was no more drunk than Cevulirn, which was to say, not at all, said, “On any cold, clear morning, with a will, we’re ready.”

“Damn Tasmôrden,” said Lord Azant, and Drumman: “Long live Lord Tristen!”

Then Emuin, who had had more than one cup himself, and who had blunted Sovrag’s first foray, lifted a hand. “Inappropriate for me to curse,” Emuin said. “And His Majesty has demanded patience of us. And no talk of war tonight.”

There was a muttering at that.

“Which,” Emuin said above the protest, “the stars declare is wise! There would be no good outcome of a venture planned this side of midnight. Say no more of it!”

“And after?” Sovrag asked,

“Tonight is not for war,” Tristen said, for Emuin’s warning had struck a certain chill into him, and he foresaw that very soon they would be saying things he had as lief not have laid before every visitor to the hall tonight… the Teranthirie father was there, and the Bryalt abbot, with the two nuns, the thanes and squires of villages, and the ealdormen, not mentioning their wives, and the guards and servants besides. Any one of them might spread news that might not serve them… whether it reached Ilefínian—or Guelessar and the north.

But he looked at all his guests, his friends— Crissand, Cevulirn, Sovrag and Pelumer and Umanon, Merishadd and Azant and the earls, and he saw around him, willing and earnest, all the power of the south, all on the verge of motion.

He saw the ladies, all in their finery, and the meal ended. But not the evening.

It was Midwinter Eve, the night the heavens shifted… and he felt an equal disturbance in the gray place, between one deep breath and the next, as all the hall hung momentarily silent, awaiting the next move.

“Play,” he said to the piper, ending all discussion. “Move the tables back.”

Servants hurried to obey, and in high good cheer. For a moment thereafter everyone was disarranged and the squeal of wood on stone and the laughter of well-sated guests alike underlay the music.

The shriek seemed to go on, shooting through stone, into the earth, wounding the ear.

Hinge of the year, Emuin had said, hinge of the Great Year and the Year of Years. Shriek by shriek, tables and benches moved, the arrangement of things undone, set aside, drawn back to clear the floor. It was so common a sound. But the gray space roiled of a sudden, and the very air turned to liquid silver.

Lewenbrook itself was a heartbeat away. So was Ynefel. There was suddenly so much chance and harm flying in the wind that Tristen found no quick counter to its malice.

And when the moving of tables was done, and before the couples took the floor:

“I wish our happiness and the king’s,” he said, standing, lifting high the cup he held. And wish he did, with all his might. “I wish happiness for all of us, when the world is turning round and the new year is coming!”

“And happiness to you, sir,” said Pelumer, lifting his cup, and so did they all. “To all our lands, happiness and good outcome.”

“And happiness to the king in Guelessar,” Crissand cried in that moment of warm extravagance, not base flattery, but the outpouring of a generous heart. “Happiness to him for sending us our lord! Gods bless His Guelen Majesty!”

“The Guelen king’s health!” said Merishadd, and Azant lifted his cup, and all the rest in a body as Azant added, “And our lord’s!”

“Hear him,” said Pelumer. “Health to our host, Lord Tristen! Long may he prosper in Amefel.”

“Long may we all prosper!” said Umanon.

Tristen drew a breath, feeling steadier, as if in such a great number of good wishes from those he counted friends the dark of midnight had passed and the currents of the new year had begun to find a direction.

How could one do better for a beginning, he thought, than in wishing one another well?

How could he have any more profound a shift in the currents than for Amefin lords and southerners to drink the health of the Guelen king? He could wish— and so could Crissand, who had set wizardry behind that generosity.

The piper played, and a handful of the younger folk moved to the floor, eager to dance.

But one lady in attendance came from the shadows by a column, all in gray and gold, a wisp of a woman gray of hair and hung about with cords and stones and charms.

The incipient dance paused. Guards moved, and hesitated in doubt. Emuin stood forward, but not far, and the priests rallied uncertainly to Emuin as the woman came. ,

But only Uwen set himself directly in her path, as the music died.

The woman’s gown seemed old fabric and strange, like cobwebs over lace, like gold cloth dimmed by dust. The ornaments, that she wore were perhaps costly, perhaps not. She was neither old nor young, and she made a low and graceful bow, sinking into her gold-touched skirts and rising from them like gray smoke from embers. It seemed a music played, but none that the pipers made, a gentle, eldritch air like the stirring of broken glass.

With a nod and a quizzical look, the woman held out her hand, invitation to the dance. And still Uwen barred the way.

But on a breath and accepting a challenge, Tristen moved past him, reached out, took dry, cool fingers, moved in stately paces, turned as the woman turned, all to that strange, distant music.

Within the murmur of consternation the piper took up a wavering tune, the same that filled the air, and the drummer found the hum and thump of a rhythm different than the tune they had played, haunting, majestic measures.

It was Auld Syes, whose eyes sparkled and whose whole bearing held the dignity of a queen.

“Lady,” Tristen said, when the measures brought them close, eye-to-eye, and her gaze was dark and deep. “Welcome.”

But while the musicians played on Auld Syes stopped the dance and stood, breathless and aglow.

“Lord,” she said then, and made another deep bow, rising again to face him. “Lord of Althalen, of Meliseriedd, of Ynefel! High King and lord of all the middle lands! Beware your enemy!”

“I am no king!” he said doggedly. But Auld Syes backed away from him bowing yet a third time. The candles blew sideways, threatening darkness, and a small shadow skipped around Auld Syes and him alike, then nipped after a tray of honeycakes at the side of the room. A sudden whirlwind ran the circuit of the room, blowing up skirts. The guests cried out in alarm, but the whirlwind ran toward the doors with a laughter like harp strings, a wind spinning and turning and dancing with a mad, fey lightness.

For a moment in the gray space, pipes sounded, and a woman ran lightly over a ghostly meadow of gray almost green, a child chasing in her footsteps.

Auld Syes had left the hall, and as she did the massive doors of the hall burst open, and the doors of the inner hall all at once banged wide with echoes down the corridor outside, one after another.

Winds swept through, riffling all the candles, then snuffing them, every one, leaving all there in utter dark.

A smell of evergreen attended.

“Light!” Emuin cried furiously, over the cries from the guests. “Gods bless! Give us light!”

Men were blind in the darkness, blind and afraid, and still the wind blew. Yet it needed nothing but the wish to see, to draw the gray, bright light out of that place and touch the candles with it, and Tristen did that, obedient to Emuin’s wish to lend light. His wish lit the hall not with the warm golden glow those candles should bear, but the icy silver of the gray place, every candle aglow, but casting little light abroad. The candle-sconces all became islands of scant luminance, and the hall outside the open doors appeared as a place of darkness similarly lit, every candle in the hall aglow but doing little good.

The guests were cast into strange, small groups in that pale gray light,

Lord Umanon and Lord Cevulirn both had found their swords.

Of Auld Syes there was no sight nor sound.

Beware your enemy, Auld Syes had said, but if there was an enemy he had to fear, it was not the darkness.

But suddenly something reached through his source of light, through the gray space itself, and threat streamed like poison through the light he had gathered and set atop the candles.

That was not the enemy, either. It remained out of his reach. He sent challenge back through the gray: he was in a Place, had his feet set, and would fight for these lives if it came.

“Lord!” a man cried from the open doors, and in starkest urgency: “Lord! The hall! The light, in the hall!”

The way Auld Syes had trod here had not sealed itself. When the man cried that, all the gray space bid fair to spill in upon them—not baneful in itself, but a cascade too much, too swift, too terrible a knowledge, from every candle in the hall. He steadied it back.

And neither was that the source of the danger, for danger had followed Auld Syes like a hound on a scent. It sought a Place in the fortress; and now he felt the widening of a rift—a breach in the wards at that place he had never trusted.

It was from that place the poison came, from that place the lights were threatened; and from out of that gulf the wind buffeted them. It was that spot in the hall, that one most haunted place.

“Uwen!” Tristen cried as he began to run toward the doors of the great hall, for no other man would he have as a shieldman, and no man else in the world would he trust to beware the Edge.

In the next instant a hand caught his sleeve, and stayed him long enough for a sword hilt to find his hand. A buffet on his shoulder sent him on.

“Go, lad!” he heard Uwen say, so run he did. He was the defense Uwen had, the defense any Man of his guests had, and he plunged into the corridor where conditions were the same: the candles there streamed the same silvery gray toward him, spots of light in a dark where Shadows ran, dark small streamers along all the mortar.

He flung up his hand, called the wards all to life, threatening all that broke the Pattern of the stones, the ancient masonwork.

At his summoning, a blue glow intruded into the gray sheen of the candles, and a glow ran along the base of the walls, up over doorways… every Line of the old fortress glowed, walls and doorways made firm and real. Shadows that flowed moved along those Lines, obedient, until they began to race toward that Place, that foreignness in the hall.

Beyond a doubt he knew Auld Syes herself was in danger, as if a thread of her being had come through this doorway, and now, retreating, stretched thinner and thinner within.

He was aware of the great mass of the ancient stone around him, and of the presence of friends at his back: he reached the old mews, that most haunted place, the place where the wards were least firm—and in and out of which the winds rushed.

He settled a tighter grip oh the borrowed sword, felt with a sweep of his left arm for Uwen’s presence where Uwen would always stand. He was there. He felt Cevulirn and Crissand likewise near him, wizardous and detectable in the gray space, more than the others. Emuin, too, was there, reaching toward him a strong and determined power, in an attempt to hold the wards…

But the blue light grew, source of the winds that battered and buffeted them.

There, there within the old structure, the Lines were almost overwhelmed, and there if dark could glow, this did. Shortly before the struggle at Lewenbrook, he had stared into a vacancy and faced the rousing of countless ghostly wings.

So the rift began to grow, and grow, and he knew what he would face. “There it is,” he said. “Where it always was. It’s open. —Emuin? Do you see?”

“I see it,” Emuin said, and others crowded near.

“Stay here,” he said. “Uwen. Stay here. Keep the others safe.”

“No, my lord,” Uwen’s voice said flatly, at his very shoulder, “Lord Crissand’s close behind ye; but he ain’t your shieldman an’ I am, beggin’ his pardon, an’ lord Cevulirn’s. I’m wi’ ye, so go on.”

“Bear a light!” Crissand called out, and the answer came back, “There is none!”

“Then find one!” Umanon cried angrily. So yet another of the lords had followed him. “Gods bless, man, find one!”

No light would serve, not here, and he needed all his strength. The light he had lent the candles everywhere in the hall he gave up, so that the dark came down in the mortal world and overwhelmed the corridor in which they stood. Men cried out in alarm. But the blue of the Lines and the blue of that Place shone the brighter in the darkness, guiding him forward.

He could not say he walked. He held the sword half-forgotten in his hand, and it seemed now instead of the solid stone of the wall, a slatted, airy structure through which blue light streamed. That was the old mews as they had been. He advanced, knowing Uwen’s presence at his side one moment and then gone abruptly as he walked beyond the solid stone of the existing wall and the Place within the walls opened wide.

Blue light softened to something near moonlight, just enough to see by, sifting through rafters and broken beams of a ruined gable end.

Perches stretched along either wall of this place, and above him wings stirred and whispered. To his first impression it was the sound of his pigeons, and safe, but in the next blink of an eye the wings that spread and bated about him were nothing so innocent. Cries came to his ears, birds of prey, hawks in great numbers, and the scream of wood on stone and the shriek of the birds and the shriek of the wind were one and the same.

The hawks pent here, scores of them, were ghosts out of a Place and a Time all but forgotten, and if they were tame at all, were tame to hands long dead.

Yet had Auld Syes gone this way?

Was it after all a doorway, that broken gable, a breach in the Lines that Were, admitting him to Lines that Had Been?

He saw before him a Place within a Place, and a Door that had never quite closed, perhaps on purpose.

There was the entry, there, in the heart of the moving wings and the haze of the streaming light that cast a glow on pale, black-barred feathers, on mad, wild eyes and open beaks that seemed to shriek forth the sound of winter storm.

The semblance of snow flew then, a battering storm half-obscuring the light, and when it ceased…

When it ceased it was not the old mews about him now, but the loft, his loft this spring in Ynefel, and the fluttering wings were only his feckless, faithful pigeons on their rafters.

He had come home. Mauryl would be below, at work at his table, elbow-deep in his charts of stars and movements of the planets, all of which pointed to this night.

He was in his loft again, and the blue glow of moonlight brightened to sky, and latest dusk, and his birds were coming home, arriving by ones and twos, stirring up dust and old feathers.

He had no names for them, had never thought they needed names, no more than the aged mice who dwelt in the wall of the downstairs hall, near Mauryl’s table. But oh! he knew them, and welcomed them, and for a moment the place opened wide to him, in utter innocence and happiness. He flung wide his arms and turned to see the familiar pattern of sky and broken boards… no need to ward such places, Mauryl said, for they were only holes. The Lines of Ynefel had stood firm despite those gaps, and Mauryl had remade the wards every evening—

—warding his window for him, too, at the foot of the first bed he remembered: his little horn-paned window, beneath which the first sinister crack had come into the wall. The rain had written patterns on it. He had, never knowing what he did or undid.

He stopped turning and stood still, heart skipping a beat as he recalled that widening, dreadful seam. He was sure now beyond all question that the ruin that had brought Mauryl down had begun there, proceeded there, worked there until there was no way for the wards to hold. Hasufin in his assault on Mauryl’s tower had come to that window and pried and pried at the stones, trying his young dreams, stirring up the shadows that were all too frequent there.

He had been the weakness in Mauryl’s defense: he, his dreams, his curiosity, his tracing random, foolish patterns on the window, amid Mauryl’s wards.

His room was below him. His bed. The stairs that led down, led there, to that room with the window.

And he knew at the same time he was in the old mews at Henas’amef, in the Zeide, near the new great hall.

He still remembered how he had come here. It was so easy here to forget his very life, to lose the thread that bound him to Uwen, and Emuin, and all the rest. He kept firm hold of that memory, clenched it like a guiding thread—he knew the way… no, not back, back was too little a word. He knew the way home, and his home was no longer here, was not this loft, this hour, this dim evening last spring.

He knew at any moment a youth might come up the stairs. That youth would bring a candle and a book, the Book, which at that time had been a mystery to him, but was not so now.

Nor were the secrets in that book secrets any longer. He knew why he had felt vague fears of presence when he lived at Ynefel, so now he knew what at least one ghostly presence was.

And if he knew when he had been afraid, he might predict, perhaps, the sites and times of his visitations to Ynefel; and by that, he might come here again.

He stood very still. The boy hid in nameless terror of Mauryl’s steps on the stairs, and feared the voices, oh, the voices, as all the imprisoned faces in the stone walls cried together.

Any moment Mauryl would come through that door, and confront him, the dearest sight and the most dreadful in all the world.

And dared they meet? Dared they, he and Mauryl, cross life and death and stand face-to-face, time present, time never to come?

Dared he? Dared they? Was it folly, or would Mauryl even see him if he tried?

His very breath seemed to stick between the bellows strokes of his chest, the hammerblows of his heart.

But he was not done with the loft. To go back undefeated, still master of this place, he must not run from it in fear: he must find what it wanted tonight, in Henas’amef.

There was a terror here besides Mauryl. And to find it he must face the blank wall at the end of his loft… which was not the end at all.

That wall secluded the true Shadow which ruled the heights of Ynefel, a perch surrounded by detritus of his depredation.

Owl lived there.

And one day a boy in Ynefel had found the way to Owl… and now the man came back, seeking what he had feared in that hour.

He looked through the broken boards, saw Owl on his perch, and Owl turned on him a furious glance.

Then wind rushed through the loft, a dreadful wind, and the place changed. Light streamed and spun through the broken beams and ruined wall, and ghostly wings stirred about him, hunters seeking prey, seeking him, so it seemed, and denying him any gain here. The old mews reshaped themselves around him, drawing him back and back, but Ynefel was still just beyond, still with danger in it.

“M’lord!” Uwen shouted.

And in the pale heart of the light, at the very end of the old mews, he saw a great blunt-winged shape flying, flying, striving to reach him in the world of Men. Owl was coming, desperately beating through that storm of light and wind.

He lifted his hand the rest of the way, offering a place for Owl’s feet, and called out to him, “Owl!” which was all the name Owl had. The blued light caught the great orbs of Owl’s eyes, whose centers drank in all light, whose intent seemed some prey beyond him.

Perverse bird. Owl was never biddable. He would miss him, fly astray, Tristen thought.

But at the very last Owl reached him and checked his speed, blunt wings rowing in the wind… lowered with a buffet of air, and feather-skirted feet clamped hard on his hand.

Owl sat safely then, no great weight, despite his size, but a weight, all the same. Abruptly Owl’s head swiveled completely around, golden eyes regarding him sharply, in what seemed profound amazement at one instant, and secret knowledge in another.

“Owl,” Tristen said, resettling his grip on the borrowed sword to nudge Owl’s feathers with a finger. Owl struck with his beak—closing on nothing, for Tristen was quicker.

“Where now?” he asked Owl, unoffended. “Where must I go?”

But Owl gave him no answer, only hunched down, no glowing apparition of an owl, now, but a lump of untidy feathers and a turned shoulder, as obstinate in presence as he had been in illusion.

“M’lord,” Uwen said, right beside him.

The wind had fallen away. The perches all around him were vacant. The light quieted to a soft and dimming glow.

Of a sudden he was aware of the Place diminishing around him, and of his way back diminishing as well. He swung around, saw Emuin and Uwen too close to him for safety.

Then he was in a hallway under a few faint candles. Crissand and Cevulirn were waiting. Umanon and Sovrag and Pelumer all had weapons drawn. Even the waif Paisi was there, his eyes wide as saucers.

“M’lord,” Uwen said then, as if to call him back to himself, to life, and his friends.

“I was at Ynefel,” he said. He had never intended other than honesty with the lords, and knew he would trouble them with that advisement, but honesty he would hew to. “Owl came to me. I don’t know why.”

“What meaning to it?” Sovrag asked. “D’ ye know?”

“No. I don’t.” He was cold from his sojourn in the gray space, and now very weary. He saw they were troubled. Emuin watched, with what feeling, whether approval or disapproval, Emuin did not impart to him, not even in the gray space. Crissand gazed at him as if he had found a strange creature in their midst, a strange creature, fearsome, and dreadful. Cevulirn regarded him with doubt. Only Uwen was still by him unchanged, undaunted, faithful as the stone underfoot, standing here before an ordinary wall, before candles which had turned out to be lighted after all.

What might he do, but what he had done? The wards had stood fast. Nothing had gotten in.

He turned, he walked, still holding Owl, toward the only refuge of comfortable light that beckoned him, and that was the great hall.

He was aware of his allies following him. He met the shocked whispers and stares of frightened guests as he walked back into his hall. The young girls who had been so full of chatter were silent, now, holding close to their mother. Men stood in stark, stiff groups, watching, asking themselves, surely, to what they were sworn.

Owl launched himself suddenly and flew ahead of him on silent wings, rising to alight high up on a cornice, above the oak-leaf frieze.

Tristen wished the comfort of a table, a cup of ale— most of all a laugh to dispel fear. But even Sovrag failed him in that, and the tables were drawn back for the dancing, so there was no place to dispose his trembling limbs but the dais and the chair of state. So he climbed up and sat, necessarily facing the solemn gathering of lords, whose looks toward him were unanswered questions.

Where did he find an answer for them?

To his dismay Owl chose that time to swoop down and settle on the finial near his hand, regarding first him with that mad, impassioned stare, then swiveling his head to cast his mad stare at all the hall, daunting those who had waited.

Some backed away. But Uwen, Emuin, and the lords of the south stood fast, and Crissand—Crissand of all of them—came closer, pale of face, but daring the moment and the silent question.

“He’s only an owl,” Tristen said, desperately. He teased Owl’s breast feathers as he would those of his tame pigeons, to make light of him, and Owl gave him a look of furious indignation: never at ease, never at peace, was Owl. “He was at Ynefel, and guided me through Marna Wood, and generally he minds his own business.” A further assay of the soft feathers won a nip at his fingers, a sharp strike that failed to draw blood.

Dared he forget that Auld Syes had been here, and that now there was Owl? So many things seemed ordinary to him, that did not seem so to Men. The lords had seen Owl before, on Lewen field… but that was hardly reassurance.

“Uwen,” he said. And Uwen stepped up to the low dais at once and without question, while he continued, helplessly, to look out at the assembly.

“Is there any threat, any harm to the halls or the town?”

“None as I see, m’lord,” Uwen said, in that reasonable, plain voice that brought quiet to horses and men alike. “Gi’ or take the old lady an’ the owl.”

There was laughter, then, an anxious, brief and loud laughter.

Tristen laughed softly, too, and afforded Owl the side of his hand to sit on. Owl’s talons this time drew blood, but that was negligible. He was rescued by the laughter, grateful to tears for the presence of friends who he now believed would not turn their shoulders to him and whisper behind their hands.

“Owl’s not altogether an ordinary bird,” he said in the difficult silence that followed, and drew another, uncertain laugh. “He goes and comes where he likes, and I suppose at the moment he likes to be here, but he may just as well decide to live in the woods. I think it bodes well, his coming.”

As if Owl heard, he took off toward the cornice again, and sat up there, staring balefully at all below him.

“There,” Tristen said. He wondered, distracted thought—if Owl was a Shadow, did Owl need to eat? The loft had shown he did. The servants should leave at least one door open… to a fierce winter draft and the hazard of his pigeons, he was sure. He dreaded that prospect, and saw the lords’ lingering disquiet. “He’s only an owl,” he said, “no matter how he comes and goes.”

“Lord Tristen is no different than he was,” Emuin said then, speaking up. “And be assured, he wishes well to all of you.”

It was in some part strange to be talked about in his hearing, much as Cefwyn and Idrys and Emuin had used to discuss him as if he were a chair or a table, when he had first arrived in Cefwyn’s hands.

Now he heard Emuin assuring his friends he would do no harm to them—and was it so? Whatever Owl was or meant, he was no natural bird, and did an ordinary lord keep a Shadow for a guest? He had his few, his faithful; but he saw all the faith, all the trust he had built with other Men near to falling in shards and pieces.

“Dance,” he said, “and drink.”

“’At’s right,” Uwen said loudly. “Fill the cups, there, and bring the sweets, and you harpers set to, somethin’ quick, wi’ the drummers!”

The drums rattled into a light cadence, Owl glared from the cornice, and the piper found his wind.

Then as Uwen came close, so Sovrag joined them, and Umanon, Azant, and others of the earls… not shunning him, but seeking his presence.

“What’s the meanin’ on’t?” Sovrag asked. “Lights goin’ out and strange old women comin’ into hall… were she a ghost?”

“Change,” said Emuin. “Change is in the stars, change is in the wind, and safer to ride it than to be ridden down.”

And meanwhile the gray space roiled and swirled, alive not only to the two of them, but to other presences, however faint and far.

Close at hand he felt the preternatural awareness of lords such as Crissand, in whom the wizard-gift burned, in Cevulirn, in whom it shone like a candle-flame, and in more than one of the others in the general company.

—Do you know? Tristen asked Emuin. Were you aware there were so many with the gift?

—This is the south, Emuin said, as if that answered all. And you are lord of it. Be wise. Bare no more secrets to these men, for your own sake. And Cefwyn’s.

Owl, on his perch, turned his back to the sounds. Men and women uncertainly took hands and danced.

Emuin, in his gray court robes, stood silent and composed himself until he made not even a ripple in the gray place.

Are you angry? Tristen wondered. He found he was, and he did not know at what, except the fear he had just passed.

And that fear perched, a little ball of feathers, up on a cornice in the hall.

Come here, he wished the bird peevishly, expecting no obedience. But to his surprise Owl flew down and, instead of perching, flew out the doors of the hall, out into the corridors.

Half the matter was solved, at least. The guards opened doors to let various folk come and go, and Owl would take care of himself.

Chapter 6

The smell of burning might be only the fire in the fireplace, but Cefwyn’s memory could not purge itself of the unholy reek that had hung over the square.

Fire had not spread from the shrine to the wooden porches nearby, which some cited as a miracle; but it was no miracle that the rioters, driven from the square, had slipped out into the town to make mischief.

All through the night the several Guard companies had alternately stood guard and chased drunken looters, until exhausted men, a tavern owner, and short tempers had clashed bloodily at Market and Hobnail Alley just before the hallowed dawn.

It was Midwinter Day.

A new year began, and the streets stood at last in numb, universal quiet, the convulsion spent… so Idrys had reported, blood-spattered and smeared with soot when last they had spoken to each other.

Toward midnight they had admitted an orderly line of mourners through the shrine, the Holy Father decently robed and the shrine aglow with hundreds of candles and echoing with choral music. Passions sank, in that solemn, dignified sight, and Efanor’s suggestion of a second penny to every man, woman, and child who passed the altar had brought whole streets out, with wives and children, outnumbering the ruffians and bringing a more sober, decent crowd to the heart of the town. The line had gone on till dawn… was still going, at the last he heard, and some likely in line three times, but the royal coffers would disburse it, as cheaper than burned buildings.

But at the dawn he had heeded his guard’s strong requests to take himself out of the dangerous outer streets, and go back to the safe center and up to his apartment, to lie on his bed if not to sleep. “The kingdom needs a live king with his wits about him,” Idrys had said, when they had dealt with a roving, armed band of thieves. “Go. Hunting brigands is my work.”

So he had come back, under escort, and found Ninévrisë had never gone to her own apartments. She had taken charge of his pages, taken his desk, sat all night directing the servant staff’s oversight of the threatened Guelesfort and the care of the town’s wounded—rendering judgment, too, where Annas found her advice useful, with her primary aid a handful of exhausted, frightened pages. The Tower of Elwynor, Annas had called her gratefully, referring to the arms of her house; and that was the way she had stood through the storm, the center to which all messages could come and where all news could be found.

She slept, exhausted, once she had him by her, resting against his side.

“Where is Luriel?” he finally thought to ask her, at one waking. “Is she still in her apartments?”

“She came back,” Ninévrisë said. “Her gown is the worse for wear, so Fiselle says.”

“Panys’ son was with the Guard, the last I saw him. A good man.” His fingers strayed across Ninévrisë’s shoulder, finding her arm as prone to tremors as his own, utter weariness, no more. Then the enormity of it all, and memory of the Holy Father’s last visit, when he had been so afraid, came back to him. “I never expected it, Nevris. The old man warned me. He tried to warn me. I didn’t think they’d dare anything like this.”

“Poor Benwyn.” Her voice was hoarse, unlike herself. “He had nothing to do with sorcery, or magic… he never threatened the Holy Father. He had nothing to do with it.”

Benwyn had nothing to do with it, but someone had taken pains to paint the murder with an Amefin look.

And who would know so well what Amefin charms looked like, but one who had been there?

And was that not the Amefin patriarch… but suspect the man of murder, and him shut in his quarters, a sick man?

He doubted it. He much doubted it.

And yet they urgently needed a suspect, a place to point the blame, something, anything to distract the commons from Benwyn… Benwyn’s connection with Ninévrisë. The mob that had risen had gone for Benwyn because he was Amefin… one of their own, but not Guelen. And because he was the foreign consort’s priest.

“The soldiers that came back with the Amefin father,” he said. “They’re familiar enough with Amefin charms, and the Bryalt.” He held her close, his thoughts scurrying through the underbrush of lordly ambitions and guilty secrets like so many frightened hares. “But would they dare, on their own? And why? Emuin would say… Emuin would say if a thing is common, you don’t see it. And what’s common under the Quinaltine roof?”

“Another priest?” Ninévrisë asked. “That zealot priest?”

“Udryn. Udryn, the name is. Idrys removed him somewhere—at least—he’s been removed somewhere, dropped in the country somewhere remote. Scare him, the notion was. But a priest could reach the robing room without notice. A priest could gain entry. We thought this Udryn was the primary danger. But who would dare attack the Holy Father?”

“Ryssand?”

“Not directly. Not directly. But a zealot could do this, he well could. Jormys himself is in danger. He’s in a mail shirt at the moment… Efanor gave it to him and told him wear it constantly. But Father Jormys will eat and sleep in the Quinaltine, where our guards can’t go. And meanwhile we can’t point the finger at the zealots or Ryssand without better proof than one of them being in the Quinaltine where they have every right to be. We can put one of them out. We can drop Udryn and whoever else we catch down a well. But how many are there? Who are they? We know the ones that have argued in public, but how do we find what a man thinks?”

“The priests might know.”

“We have no authority except to appoint. We can’t arrest, we can’t charge, we can’t investigate. The priests have to do it.”

“They aren’t all murderers, and they know each other. Make the murderer ashamed to face them. Make him guilty.”

He had taken it as his part, man and king, to console her fears, even to lie to her, to see her have rest. He drew back a little, remembering that the warm, sweet presence was the Regent of Elwynor, Uleman’s daughter, priestly and canny as ever her father was… and it was clear good sense she was offering him.

“They’ve passed out cloths with the Holy Father’s blood—anything that touched him. The people stand for hours to see him. He’s half a damn saint—forgive me.” He had been with soldiers all night, and under attack.

“The people need one. Don’t they?”

“But who killed him, but another priest, Ryssand’s priest, and if I had Ryssand’s signed confession with his seal on it I couldn’t use it. I need Ryssand, until I can marry Efanor to his daughter, gods save me. There’s still a murderer in the Quinaltine, and Benwyn’s still dead, and there’s still the Amefin charms, real or not. For your sake and for Tristen’s we can’t have that.”

“What can we do?”

“Accuse a murderer… accuse Tasmôrden, who’s the likeliest the people know.”

“An Elwynim. And will that make me safe?”

“It’s a better direction than any other. It’s all we can do. Say it was sorcery and Tasmôrden suborned it. If you can’t damn a man for what you know he’s done, damn him anyway. It was a spy. An assassin slipping in from outside, concealed by sorcery, moved by sorcery.”

“And my people, innocent people, are taking refuge in Amefel, inside Ylesuin, where they have such charms. Where will that go?”

“We can’t let it turn to Amefel. We can’t let people ever take the notion. It was sorcery, and it was Tasmôrden, from straight across the river. Gods know we’ve bodies to spare: sixteen dead and one burned beyond recognition. We’ll say first we caught the assassin. We have him in chains. We dole out the news day by day and keep the people in expectation. Then we display the remains. Sorcery killed him in his cell.” He felt no pride in what he was saying, or planning. He liked far less making her party to it… but it was her advice that had prompted him. “Where will the people’s anger light then, but where we need it to nest?”

“The murderer will know,” Ninévrisë whispered. “And what will he think?”

“He’ll tell Ryssand and Ryssand will know. And Ryssand will share our secret, only Ryssand and the murderer… and one day Idrys will see justice is done. It may not be tomorrow. But it will happen. Efanor’s Jormys is in office now—the Quinalt council has to confirm, but the Holy Father had enough votes to rule there, and they hate the zealots. We’ll banish sorcery. We’ll make saints of Benwyn and the Holy Father.”

“Sorcery isn’t remote from us,” Ninévrisë said faintly, leaning her head against him. “And it might, after all, be true, this lie. Send to Emuin. He should know this.”

“We can’t send a letter like that. No. There’s far too much risk. Our couriers have had narrow escapes.” He forgot, at times, that Ninévrisë had wizardry of her own. And now it worried him. “Was Benwyn a wizard?”

She shook her head, a motion against his heart. “Not a shred of one.”

“Are there wizards?”

“There’s Emuin. There’s Tristen, if one counts him.”

“I’d count him.”

“He’s—”

“Not a wizard.” He understood the exception. “But there are others.”

“One hears them. One feels them.”

“Do you think what we plan might not be a lie?”

“I don’t know,” she said faintly. “At first I thought so, but now I don’t know.”

Ryssand would expect blame for the Holy Father’s death. He had immediately to send a message to reassure Ryssand of that notion, dangle favor before him to keep him from the desperation that would drive the scoundrel to protect himself. Desperate, Ryssand could bring the kingdom down.

It was a dangerous course they steered, but it was one that would keep the north united. In the Holy Father he had lost a valuable ally. In Jormys, loyal to Efanor, he had another.

Yet he must send condolences to Sulriggan, the late Patriarch’s cousin, and keep that lord tied to him, assured of his continued favor even with the Patriarch dead. That man could be useful.

Luriel’s marriage had to go forward, early. Young Rusyn might become a hero of the defense of the Quinaltine. He had deserved it. His father certainly had. A reward of lands would shore up Panys’ wounded dignity: he cared not a jot about Murandys, though he supposed he must.

Something rattled like claws against the window.

Rain, he thought it first, but saw no drops on the glass.

It kept up, and kept up.

It was sleet coming down.

Chapter 7

To Tristen’s distress the weather turned… natural weather for winter, so everyone said as the sleet came, and then the snow. Owl must have found some nook out of the wind, or was hunting mice: the pigeons came fearlessly to the window for bread, and the servants mopped and swept continually in the halls against the traffic that came and went.

But it was not Tristen’s wish that the weather turn, and he found something ominous in the worsening storm. Wagons with tents and other gear were on the road in the storm that first froze the roads—that was a help—and then began to ice them, and that was no help at all.

Umanon’s few wagons arrived out of a blinding white, to set up camp in ground beginning to freeze.

“One can’t hold off nature forever,” Emuin said with a shake of his head, when Tristen went to his tower to consult. “I’ve not seen such a spell, and I suppose it’s simply given us all the snow at once.”

“I’m havin’ men pound in pegs now,” Uwen informed him when, wrapped in his heaviest cloak, he visited the camps outside the walls, “there bein’ little difference in the tents, an’ if there is, they’ll rig some-thin’ clever. If this goes on, they’ll just be damned thankful the pegs is drove in before the ground freezes. Granted they can find ’em. We’re settin’ markers, and hope the rest on ’em’s quick arrivin’. I figure they’ll press on into the night to get here.”

“I wish,” Tristen said, “but my wishes aren’t all that’s had effect, or the snow wouldn’t fall yet.”

The lords prowled the hall and the stables and hoped for their tents and supplies, concerned, clearly, while Emuin sat in his tower hoping in vain for a sight of the sky and the stars at night.

And just at sundown, the storm gave up to a general, an eerie quiet.

More riders came in, Ivanim, cold men and cold horses, glad of a great bonfire Uwen had ordered set up for a beacon in the night, to guide men to the town. Cevulirn went down to meet the newcomers, who were his, but the heavy horsemen of Imor with all their gear and remounts were still out in the storm. Sovrag went down to help. Umanon and Pelumer simply fretted, near the town lords gathered in the great hall. It was their men still to come, still out in the storm.

The fact was that contrary to all Pelumer’s intentions the handful of Lanfarnessemen who should have come after their lord were late: Lanfarnesse was late again, and now it was their lord who worried and paced beside Umanon, until, past midnight, the two lords decided to go down to the bonfire, and called for heavy cloaks.

“I’ll go with you, sir,” Tristen said, having no more easy rest than Umanon, thinking that if he were outside the walls and away from the clamor of a living town, he might hear less noisy things, out across the land.

Crissand, too, who kept them company among the local nobles, said he would go, or even send out his household men searching for the missing.

“My men know the road,” Pelumer said—temerity to suggest that the rangers of Lanfarnesse could not find Henas’amef. “They’re delayed, is all. My folk don’t press the weather if they see a hazard in it.

“They may well have stopped for the night,” Pelumer added as they rode down through the town, cloaked and gloved and wrapped up snugly. The wind was gathering force again after sunset. Any surface exposed quickly turned white on the side facing the gale, and all of them were half-white by the time they passed the gate.

“Bridges won’t support the heavy wagons,” Umanon said, “and my men will have to ford at several places. That means a camp to dry out, with the wind like this. But if they’re close, they’ll press on, no matter the hour.”

The place outside the walls had blossomed with tents over recent days, and most of the horses were moved out to shelter in the places provided for them, with warm, dry straw, so they were comfortable.

And there, just as they came down, came a last weary number of carts, in from the road.

“They’re here!” Umanon said, knowing his own, and vastly relieved: indeed, the men were riding not the light horses they used for travel, but the heavy horses, whose great strength had brought them in.

So they were safe, and the men from the garrison and the Amefin guard fell on the wagons to get the frozen canvas spread in proper places, and to get wood for warmth.

More, the tavern near the gate had prepared a hot meal on a standing order, and men went through the gates and out again, all on the town’s hospitality, fed and fed well, with no need to rely on their own resources on this bitter cold night.

Everything was taking shape despite the snow, and men called to winter camp were surprised and relieved at the comfort they did have.

“We have everything in order,” Cevulirn came to Tristen to say. “I’ll spend the night with my men, and in good comfort, too. We’ve things to talk about, my lieutenant and I.”

It was not all that easy. Men struggled with stiff canvas, stiffened ropes to unpack the wagons. Umanon’s men elected to move the teams and to leave the wagons standing where they were until morning, and that proved a wise expedient, for the wind was increasing, carrying snow so thick it was difficult to keep the torches lit.

The bonfire alone shone through the veiling snow, a light grown wan and strange in the opening of the heavens.

Nature let loose, Tristen said to himself, hugging his cloak to him and wondering if indeed they would have all the snow they had been due. Gusts buffeted him, carried away a tent from cursing men, who simply let it go and caught it when it fetched up against another tent.

Things went well, but not without struggle. He rode Petelly disconsolately along the aisle, hooded against the fall, and told himself he should give up worrying and take Petelly up to his warm stable, having done all he could do, and the Imorim having come in.

He could do most by wishing for the weather to improve. He might prevail. He had done it once.

Yet he had not heard the Imorim until the last. He had failed with the weather.

Was that the way the new year and the Year of Years was setting the pattern, and had things gone as well as he had hoped on Midwinter Eve?

When he thought that, the gray space worried him with a sense of something amiss, nothing he could catch, only a trace, like a scent the wind might bring one moment and carry away the next. It was none of the men here, nothing like Cevulirn.

He was in the last aisle of Pelumer’s camp, and about to enter Cevulirn’s, when the notion came to him that someone was in the storm, strayed men, perhaps… perhaps some of Pelumer’s men, or stragglers after the Imorim.

Then something brushed his shoulder and made him start, until it happened a second time and he knew it had been Owl.

“What do you want?” he asked the uncooperative bird. He suddenly realized that he was alone: his guards had helped at the wagons, and somehow now they and he had separated in the driving snow.

Now of a sudden Owl brushed past him and wheeled away, off toward a troubling sense of presence in the storm. Follow. Follow me.

In the world of Men that track led simply down the road, as it bore toward Levey. It was a road he knew, in the heart of his province, and it was the road down which Umanon’s men would come. There might be stragglers.

But stragglers that Owl cared for?

He turned Petelly’s head and followed.

No one knew he had gone. Uwen was at work in the farthest camp, and Crissand had gone to assist Cevulirn, and by now the snow came down so thick the surviving torches were faint, blurred stars, the bonfire a hazy sun.

Owl brushed-his arm on another pass and raked right past Petelly’s mane, startling the horse to a heart-stopping skip under him, a skid on a snowy ditchside, right off the road.

Yet here, remote from all the lives that occupied his attention in the camps, remote from the town and wrapped in snow-laden gusts and storm, he discovered a clear wisp of a presence, not one life, but two, or maybe three.

What was more, now at least one or two sought him, aware of him, and desperate, trying to come toward him. If they were Umanon’s men, at least one had wizard-gift.

He rode Petelly up onto the road again and in that direction, still bearing toward Levey. Owl flew generally ahead of him, appearing at times out of a veil of snow, and gone as quickly, always in that direction. Follow. Follow. Don’t delay.

By now, he thought, there might be a general search for him, and Uwen would be upset with Lusin and his guards, who would blame themselves for his straying.

But Owl was persuasive, and miraculous things had happened on this road, on which the old oak lay overthrown, and Auld Syes had met him.

It could not be Auld Syes using the gray space. It was a fearsome thought, for something about her and her daughter he had always been reluctant to challenge there.

Yet he went on. If danger was here, it was not the sort Uwen or Lusin could face, nor Crissand with a dozen men-at-arms behind him, and the presence he felt was faint and weary and fading, as if at any moment it would go out and leave him no guide at all in this snow-choked night.

“Hallo!” he called out, and searched the gray space, as well, trying to learn its nature.

But fainter and fainter the presence grew, no longer moving toward him. Whether the travelers had a horse, or whether they went afoot he had not been sure, but he often could tell whether creatures lived and moved in a place, a fox, a hare, a horse, or a man: he had no such sense tonight, only of himself and Petelly—not even of Owl. Such as a wish would help, he wished them to stay alive and not to sink down and become lost in the snow, for things were chancier and chancier, and he no longer trusted the gray space to tell him… only Owl, only Owl, moving against the obstinacy of the storm that did not want him to reach these lives. The weather fought him—had broken free of his will, poured snow and sleet and bitter ice, and now he fought it, and Owl fought it, and brave Petelly lowered his head and plodded as best he could, shaken by the gusts, wishing continually to turn back.

Came the third and the fourth hill, and a cold so great Petelly stumbled to his knees and he had to get off before Petelly could rise again. He stood with his arms about Petelly’s ice-coated neck, wishing him health, wishing not to have harmed him by this mad venture, and Petelly all at once gave a great sigh and brought his head up, as if he had taken a second wind.

Mount he did not, however, for Petelly’s sake. He led him, the reins wrapped securely in gloved fingers too stiff with ice to feel what they held, and he walked, and walked, until he saw a something like a rock in the middle of the road, a lump that should not be there.

He reached it, and prodded it, and it Unfolded into a cloaked, exhausted woman, and another, in her arms.

“Lord!” she breathed., and clung to him as he helped her up. “My sister… my sister. Help us.”

Even in the dark and the driving snow he knew that voice and that shadowed face, knew it from his earliest meetings in the world of Men. Lady Orien clasped his arms in entreaty, the thick snow gathering apace to the side of her hooded cloak and her face, and he bent to help her fallen sister, who lay huddled in the snow, limp and difficult to rouse. “Come now,” he said, and laid his hands on Lady Tarien, and wished her to wake.

But he did not wish alone. Orien lent her efforts, laid her hands on his, and the gray space shivered around them. Then the limpness became shivering, and Tarien half waked.

“They burned the nunnery,” Orien said between chattering teeth, the snow battering their faces. “They would have killed us. We had no choice but flee. And my sister, my sister… we couldn’t walk any farther.”

“We’ll put her on my horse,” he said, and gathered Tarien up to her feet, feeling the thickness of her body as he held her. It was not at all the lithe, lissome Tarien he knew.

“She’s with child,” Orien said as he half carried her. “Be careful of her.”

He stopped, looked at her, dismayed at what he heard, dismayed that Owl had betrayed him, and led him here, to this unwelcome presence. Yet what could he do but leave them to die here, and nowhere had he learned to be that heartless.

Half-fainting, Tarien tried to grasp the saddle leather herself. He lifted her as high as he could, and willed Petelly to stand still while with some difficulty and Orien’s help with Tarien’s skirts and cloak he managed to settle Tarien upright on Petelly’s back.

“He’ll warm you,” he said, and settled the cloak over her and Petelly together, about her legs. He reached up, caught its edges, and closed her half-senseless fingers on it. “Keep hold of it. It’s not far to Henas’amef, and the wind will be at our backs, now. It’s not that far to shelter.”

“We were nearly there,” Orien said.

And Owl had led him.

Orien faltered in the high snow, her boots snow-caked and inadequate, but Petelly had enough to do with one. They walked, and Tarien rode. Orien leaned against him at times, seeking to shore up her strength through wizardry as she must have done for more than one night on this road—not a good heart, but brave, and now failing. With trepidation he lent her what she must have to walk, not at all pleased with the rescue, and strengthened that much, she began to speak in broken phrases of fire and sword, of their walking day and night.

“Where was this?” he asked, and learned from Orien’s labored speech of an attack on Teranthine nuns, of the two of them hunted through the night as the nunnery burned.

“We had a horse,” Orien said. “But he ran last night. The snow came, and the weather grew worse and worse—we slept in a farmer’s haystack, and never found the house. We walked, and walked… and then we heard you, where we had all but given up.”

Winter had raged from the time they must have left their exile. It had chased them with a vengeance.

But the storm wind had seemed to lessen from the very moment he had found them in the snow, as if wizardry or outraged nature had spent its strength and now gave up the battle. The clouds broke and scudded past until, under a heaven as black and calm as the land was white, they topped that last hill before the town.

There the night showed them stars on the earth, the watch fires of camps around the snow-besieged walls of Henas’amef.

“An army?” Orien asked in dismay. “An army, about my town?”

“My army,” Tristen said in that moment’s pause, and added: “My town. My province.”

He began to walk again, leading Petelly, with Orien at his side.

Owl flew ahead of them, on broad, silent wings.