Fortress of Owls

Chapter 1

Two lords of Ylesuin rode out under a sky filled with scattered clouds, a heaven pasturing fat, misdirected sheep. It portended fair if fickle weather as they went out the gates of Henas’amef, two lords with a mingled guard of Ivanim and Guelenfolk… a mixed guard, and a startled flock of pigeons, winging out and out toward the still-sleepy west.

Hold court, Emuin had said, and that Tristen had done, if hastily. Take account, Emuin had said, and that accounting, given Cevulirn’s brief but essential personal presence, had seemed the most pressing thing.

Other matters were already attended: the garrison flag flew atop the hill they had left, no longer under the same captain, but firmly in the hand of Uwen Lewen’s-son, who had some distress at being left behind this morning, but there he was.

“I ain’t troubled for you, m’lord,” Uwen had said last night, “as ye manages things right well when they come to ye, but ye do have this way o’ findin’ the trouble in a place. An’ pokin’ about the north, lad—are ye sure we’re ready for’t?”

Tristen had laughed, as Uwen could make him laugh even considering such a dire possibility. But he thought they were indeed ready. It was the river he proposed to visit, and Captain Anwyll, and his intention was not to provoke Tasmôrden.

“I fear worse if we leave Bryn to its own devices even another day,“ he had said to Uwen this morning, just at the top of the hill, when they were setting out, ”and you’ve Drumman, and Azant to advise you, so you should do very well even if the king’s officers come visiting. Never fear.”

“It’s the Elwynim come visitin’ concerns me,” Uwen said. And standing very near him, face-to-face before he set his foot in the stirrup: “Ye take care, lad. Ye take great care.”

“We will,” Tristen had assured him, and they had parted with an embrace… no man else would he have trusted so much, not with the chance that the flight of the officers to Guelessar might rouse some inquiry. The better men of the Guelen Guard had come into line once Uwen had walked in with fire in his eye and set the garrison barracks in order, and indeed, some rode with him now. Uwen would shake the Guelen Guard until order fell out: he might have evaded command all this time, but he had waded into the matter with a clear notion of what he expected, as he said, from otherwise good soldiers, and he had the loyalty of the remaining sergeants: that was of great importance.

Accordingly Tristen had far less worry leaving the town than when the former captain had commanded all the armed might in his capital, and them a foreign, hated presence. He had no doubt his letter would reach Idrys, either, in the good sergeant’s hands… and the Lord Commander, once warned, was completely capable of dealing with the Guelen captain.

So he and Cevulirn, Amefel, and Ivanor, rode out together to see the riverside, taking their course around to the north of the town and its hill.

There they turned off on the snowy, lesser-used road that wended through low hills toward the north and its villages. The road they took now was the same that led to Elwynor, the same that, once across the river by the bridge Anwyll guarded, led on to Ilefínian.

Theirs was not the only party going out from Henas’amef today. He had sent Crissand to Levey and to his other villages, and southward, as his right hand… for the pieces and parts of a policy had begun to fall into place, and messengers of various sort were carrying word of decisions taken. Before Cevulirn had come in, he had feared he might have no choice but to call up men a second time in a year and fling them against a better-armed, trained enemy to support the Marhanen king. The Amefin had faced yet one more unwanted war, if not on their own soil, then just across the river, with their backs to the water, in no enviable position and without the strength to carry an attack on foot to any great distance at all. They would become the anvil to Cefwyn’s hammer from the northeast.

But with Cevulirn’s promise of defense, came the hope that southern villages like Levey might keep their sons and plant their fields and expect to enjoy the harvest of them. Now they had a chance to bring troops to bear on the riverside, make firm that defense, and set a camp this spring on Tasmôrden’s side of the river. For with the fast-moving light horse Cevulirn could supply, and with other lords coming in from the south, they would become a force that could strike hard and deep from such a camp and, with support from behind and bridges in their control, never be pinned with their backs against the river.

So, a situation with which he was far better pleased, they were riding north to inform the riverside villages that Ivanor was with Amefel, and to let them see with their own eyes that they had a strong force protecting them.

And, second and not the least reason for his going this direction himself, Bryn’s lands lay between here and the river. From the small region nearest the town and for a good distance more had been Lord Cuthan’s land, a district foremost in Amefel’s councils, their lord able to secure whatever he wished, even from the viceroy.

Now suddenly these villagers of Bryn were left as worse than lordless men, unrepresented in council; they were left with their oaths of fealty connecting them to an angry and embittered exile across the river… and they were left, as Lord Drumman had said, without any confidence in their new duke’s disposition toward them, whether under a new duke of Amefel they would become the spoils of some angry rival of Cuthan’s who might be granted the earldom, or whether they might simply be neglected and set at disadvantage among the earldoms. At very least, they might doubt the enthusiasm of their new duke for drawing his firmest defense to include them.

That situation of doubt, he and all the council were resolved, could not continue. Lord Cuthan was now formally dispossessed, by vote of the council of peers, nothing coerced, and that settled any claims of succession. So the other earls had taken other resolutions to sever the ties and the claim Cuthan had on them, and had those resolutions witnessed and sealed by the Bryaltine abbot. Those documents also Tristen had in hand, on a very important purpose of their riding out, if not the only one.

Far faster for a troop of riders to traverse this road to the river than it was for laden oxcarts. The deep frozen traces they followed were those of heavy wheels, inconvenient for the horses, who paced beside the ruts. Their course took them among low hills and within view of small woods, cut back from the road. Lord Heryn had removed all potential cover for banditry from roads and from rides: so Crissand had said. Lord Heryn had done most of the clearing, having no forester such as Cefwyn had over the extensive Crown lands, preserving and maintaining the woods, but simply directing where trees might be cut and where wood rights might be let to various earls for money. Removing the woods might have been a mistake, and Tristen wondered what the land might have been before Heryn; but still, the forces Amefel might raise were infantry that were accustomed to stand in lines, not slip through forest. Fighting among trees disordered their ranks and confused their signals: he had no difficulty understanding Heryn’s reasons. The forces Cevulirn lent, too, light horse, were such as might use the Aswydds’ roads to good advantage, riding with lightning speed as the Ivanim did, each with a horse in reserve… overland at need, but at no point through woods.

Still, if he could bring in Lanfarnesse, who used the woods and hills very willingly, he might yet bring force through the wooded lands to the west, assuring Amefel that no Elwynim army could slip in unseen.

And if he could bring in the help of Sovrag of Olmern, who could bring supply right to the bridgeheads by river barge, he could bring daunting force to bear on Tasmôrden’s underbelly, while Tasmôrden’s face was toward Cefwyn. Tasmôrden would not like it, not in the least, to be forced to face Cefwyn and the Guelen heavy horse on Cefwyn’s terms, on the flat ground the maps showed in Elwynor’s middle.

So Tristen said to Cevulirn, divulging his thoughts in this privacy of two riders with their guard some little distance behind.

“Tasmôrden thought he could create distraction here in Amefel,” Tristen said, “and if I have your help, we’ll make it so this border is no choice for him.”

“A very good prospect,” Cevulirn agreed, while the ground passed beneath them at a good, brisk clip.

Tristen rode Petelly, with Gery in reserve; and Cevulirn on the elder of the pair of dapple grays, the best of Ivanim breeding, a horse near white, gloriously beautiful even in winter coat… which no one could say of bay Petelly. All the horsemen behind were Ivanim, wearing colors of gray and green, on horses mostly that Crysin breed that was the pride of the Ivanim, light and quick and docile in handling, intelligent on the trail and willing and brave in the heat of battle. Even Petelly’s willful stubbornness abated in the Ivanim’s influence, and Gery went as calmly as the others at lead. If the Ivanim’s skill with horses was magic, it was a magic Tristen set himself to learn, but he despaired ever of teaching it to his Amefin folk, who were devoted to the earth, kept their feet generally on it, and were only stable in battle as long as they were going forward. Count the Guelens much the same, but heavy-armed and deliberate, a great force once they arrived, but slow. It was the Ivanim which Tristen envied their lord, the Ivanim whose fast-moving help had revised all possibilities.

Crissand, he feared, was jealous, left behind, jealous and concerned, yet proclaiming for himself the visit to Levey. Crissand went alone and was possibly out of sorts, being no help such as Cevulirn could be, having no horse, only a depleted infantry and a store of weapons.

“I’ll assure Your Grace of their loyalty,” Crissand had said, in the dawn, “and take them your goodwill.”

Clearly Crissand had wished to go where Tristen went, and was downcast in his hopes.

“I rely on you,” Tristen had said to him, and, a word he still found troubling to have uttered, “as aetheling when the time comes.”

Then Crissand had looked taken vastly aback, and all vestige of resentment fled his face and his demeanor.

“My lord,” Crissand had said then, and taken himself off to Levey, as stunned to have heard it as Tristen found himself, having said it, riding out with the cavalry he far more coveted, and with Cevulirn, whose alliance gave him a weapon he could wield with far greater subtlety than the blunt, brute force of the Amefin and Guelen foot.

What had possessed him, to have said it?

Yet he had seen the resentment, and felt there was justice in that resentment, and he knew that Crissand had heard the word aetheling the same as he, when Auld Syes had said it. So he brought it into the light, and let Crissand know he had a place with him, and that he was not dispossessed, either of friendship or of inheritance. Crissand had ridden off on his mission with a great possibility in his hands, and he had caught the fear of it as well as the honor.

But now, this morning, having cast that knowledge into the light, and riding free and with the Ivanim around him, he felt a lightness of spirit he had not felt since summer. He had done the thing he needed do. He had found a missing boy and confirmed a friend’s place in his heart. The snows of winter lay all about, the cold made everything difficult, and yet he soared on a sense of hope, as if this morning important things were at last going as they ought.

They made good time in such good weather, such uncommon cooperation of the heavens. They made change and change about with the horses, after the Ivanim custom… and they went so much faster than the oxcarts he had sent out on the day of meeting Cevulirn that they passed two camps the ox train had used before the sun stood high over the western hills.

“We may yet overtake the captain,” Cevulirn said. “He may not have his camp built yet.”

But toward evening, and without overtaking Anwyll, they reached the place they had aimed for as their way stop… and their first destination, a small huddle of huts in a snowy surrounds of sheep-meadow and forest-crowned hills. The huts centered around a rustic, modest hall with a stubby stone tower at its north end for defense and lookout—its sole truly warlike feature a wooden archer’s gallery around the tower summit. That wooden scaffold might be the only recollection of the summer’s threats, a demonstration that these sheds and huts, yes, and the sheep and the small produce of its summer gardens, would be defended. Bandits or Elwynim intruders might find Modeyneth village too difficult a resource.

The snow in the vicinity was trampled, quite thoroughly, by men and sheep. Of the ox train there was no sign but the continuing ruts in the road, so they were sure that Anwyll had pressed on, nothing delaying… commendable in him, Tristen thought, as many things in Anwyll were indeed commendable. He had ordered haste, and haste Anwyll had managed.

But dare he think, far less worthily, that Anwyll had rather camp on the road than come under a rustic Amefin roof and ask hospitality of a rural lordling? Guelenmen were not loved here; and perhaps the place with its archer-platforms had felt too cold to a company of king’s men.

At their riding in, however, with banners displayed, with the jingling of harness and the blowing of horses anxious for rest, first one door and then another cracked and faces appeared, cautiously.

Then the thane of Modeyneth himself, a young man, ran out into the yard of the manor, not pausing for a cloak, pale of face and completely astonished at the visitation… though he could not be astonished, after Anwyll had passed this way, that the lord of Ynefel and Althalen now held all Amefel.

And the White Horse of Ivanor informed any eye the other lord in question was Cevulirn of Toj Embrel, who had never been anything but a friend… amazing indeed that he was here, but friendship of the armed men who had ridden into his village was not in question.

“Your Grace,” was the thane’s salutation: not my lord, that might acknowledge fealty, but the Your Grace that any man might pay to him and to Cevulirn. The Amefin were independent souls, and the thane clearly reserved his devotion. “How may we serve?”

He was Cuthan’s man; but he was the best of the thanes of the honor of Bryn: so the earls all agreed. A young man with a common wife, he had marched his contingent to join the muster of Amefel, when by simple expedient of geography he might have evaded the call. He had fought at Lewenbrook, when Bryn had otherwise been reluctant and scant of appearance. In the recent troubles he had stayed to his land and made no requests of the duchy, nor appeared in court at all during the viceroy’s rule… or yet come to town during his rule.

“Lodging,” Tristen requested of the thane, aware as he did so that Uwen was accustomed to speak for him and he had become so accustomed to having Uwen do so that he felt uncertain of proprieties, making himself coequal with Cevulirn, speaking for himself and the small guard that rode with him. “Food.”

“Safety on this house,” Cevulirn added, at which the young thane drew a breath, much as if he had doubted their reasons… perhaps with thoughts of that great convoy of carts that had gone down the road to the river, the same direction his vanished earl had gone, right through this village.

“Your lordship,” the thane replied to Cevulirn. “Your Grace. Welcome to Modeyneth.” Inevitably, the young and curious had gathered; but so had their elders, mothers bundled in skirts and heavy shawls and scarves, some carrying babes in arms almost indistinguishable from their own bulk; old men, alike wrapped in heavy cloaks; and craftsmen and herdsmen with the signs of their trade about them and in their hands. “There’s stabling for a few, shelter for more. Come in, let the boys tend the horses, and come in out of the wind.”

The Ivanim assuredly would not abandon care of their horses or their gear to anyone, and in their example, the Guelens of Tristen’s guard thought the same, so they all went to the stables, Tristen as well, settling Gery and Petelly together into the endmost large stall, with his own hands and the village boys’ help seeing to their food and water.

After that, the manor opened its doors to him and all the company, and provided warm water for washing by a rustic, rough-masoned fireplace large enough for a sheep. To the stew cooking on the other hook, the women of the house added more water and more turnips and potatoes, while the young men of the house arranged benches and brought more in from storage, served up ale and bread to stave off hunger, all in a hall so small and quaint the rafters were hung with farming implements and the hounds had worn a small track in the earthen floor, with their restless circling the table and the surrounding benches against the walls. The dogs were shameless beggars, and in the way of men and dogs men fed them morsels and became less the strangers.

In that warmth and ease armor buckles were loosened, men lounged about the walls on the low fixed benches that embraced the room, and young folk brought in a snowy table-plank from outside, with its supports, to add more seats with the lords. There followed another bustle of preparation, village women in their aprons and winter wraps turning up at the door of the great house to offer additional spoons and bowls from their own hearths, as Tristen was curious to see… one or two apiece, for this was by no means the Zeide, and very far even from one of the great town houses in luxury.

When they sat down it was at a plain, scarred table among several tables, at the head of the room, and with the dogs hanging close by their master’s elbow, waiting in tongue-lolling hope as the young folk brought the pottery bowls and the bread. More of that was baking, and the ale had already found approval. The stew went down with comforting warmth, all with small talk of the day, the weather, and, of greater import to the village, the news out of Henas’amef: the arrival of the Ivanim, the disaster to Meiden, and the aid to the southern villages.

That, and the great wagon train that had passed, only using the well, taking offered ale, but bound resolutely for the river. “Guelens,” the thane’s older cousin said, as if that summed up everything, “fitted out for war.”

“And bearing Your Grace’s orders,” said the thane himself. “And leaving a great curiosity behind them. Is it war before spring, and on this road?”

“Not so soon, sir,” Tristen said, “and if I have my will, not on this land. I wish to prevent the war from crossing into this district. Did your former lord advise you, passing through, what had happened?”

“Our lord,” the thane said, a man anxious and troubled from before their arrival: he gave that impression; and having seen Guelen forces going through his land, followed by wagons and supply as of some great force, he had sure reason to regard it all with doubt. “Our lord, Your Grace, passed in the dawn a fortnight back, with Guelen soldiers about him, and no happy look.”

“Did he speak?”

“Not that the soldiers would allow. I took it for some mission to the Elwynim.” Perhaps the thane did not now so take it: he had a worried look, and his eyes shifted from one to the other of them… for as it turned out, he knew nothing of what had transpired to cause his lord’s exile.

“You fought at Lewen field,” Cevulirn said.

“Yes. I did.” This with a small lift of the head, a motion of pride.

“Those of us who did saw things, did we not?” Cevulirn said. “Such things as give a man an understanding of our enemy that the court in Guelemara does not have. The southern lords were there, to a man; all the south takes it of great importance to end this matter with the Elwynim, before some wizard or other finds Tasmôrden’s side and gives us a far worse enemy at our threshold. Your new lord attracts that sort of opposition, sir, being what he is. I think you may understand that, too.”

The thane cast a wary look Tristen’s way.

“But it was not a mission to the Elwynim your former lord had,” Tristen said.

“Our former lord, Your Grace?”

The guard they had with them along with the thane’s men had found place on the benches around the sides of the rustic hall, with ale and wooden platters. Conversation there had fallen away in a great listening hush so deep even the hounds stood still from their restless pacing.

“Your lord is banished. There is no lord of Bryn.”

All breath in the hall seemed stifled.

“And what then brings Your Grace?” the thane asked.

“Lord Cevulirn is right: the longer Elwynor fights, the more likely some force will take advantage of Tasmôrden’s danger… when the king comes. You’ve not asked me why I dismissed your lord.”

Modeyneth’s face became guarded and still. “It’s in your right and your gift to do so, Your Grace, and so with us all.”

“You have yet to call me your lord. Am I that?”

The hush deepened, if it were possible, and lasted a moment longer. “For my people’s sake you are my lord, and within your right.”

“Will you swear to me, sir?” This across the bread and cups of ale, the remnant of an excellent stew which the thane’s young wife had provided. “Lord Cuthan hasn’t released you, but I release you from your oath, and as of a fortnight ago you’ve had no lord. Will you swear to me, sir, or cross the river to join Lord Cuthan? I’ll give you safe passage if that suits you.”

“These people can’t cross, with their land and their livestock. This land can’t cross.”

“Lord Cuthan might cross here to take it back.”

There was another space of silence.

“Your Grace is asking me for my oath against my lord.”

“Yes, sir, for your oath, and your loyalty to me and to whomever I grant the lordship of Bryn. Lord Cuthan betrayed Meiden and held knowledge from him which cost his life and a good many other lives, besides other crimes. Therefore I exiled your lord, and therefore I took back the title and honor. If you still are Cuthan’s man, I give you leave to take whatever goods and men you wish and join Cuthan across the river, to share his fortunes, whatever they may be. He is my enemy, and he became the council’s enemy, and Meiden bled for it.”

That the thane hesitated long spoke well for his honesty. He rested his elbows on the scarred wood of the table and clasped his hands before his mouth, his eyes bright and steady, if troubled. “I marched behind you at Lewenbrook.”

“I know.”

“That the king in Guelessar sent you is on the one hand not astonishing. But it is unexpected, if Your Grace will forgive my saying so. It bodes better than Parsynan.”

“Him I sent away. He was a thief, not alone of the jewelry we found. That Cuthan worked against him I find no fault at all. But that Cuthan conspired with Tasmôrden and betrayed Meiden to the king’s soldiers, I do not forgive, and will not forgive. Nor will the other earls he failed to advise that the king’s men were coming forgive him, either.””

“Did he do such a thing?”

“That, yes. And more.”

“So I’ve heard, too,” Cevulirn said, “from young Meiden, and others of the earls.”

All this the young thane heard with a sorrowful face, and a thoughtful one, and at that last, he nodded. “Then you’ll have my oath to whatever lord you appoint. I do swear it and will swear, and will obey the lord you set over us. How may I serve my lord duke?”

“Build a wall, between the two hills beyond this village, and be ready to hold it if trouble comes. Let those hills be your walls.”

Modeyneth leaned back from the table with a wary look. “The king’s law forbids Amefin to fortify, except at Henas’amef.”

“The king hasn’t told me so,” Tristen said, “and I say you should build a wall, and this is the lord of Bryn’s charge.”

“But the lord of Bryn is across the river, Your Grace.”

“Is he? I think not. You are the lord of Bryn, sir. You are my choice.”

“I?” The thane now earl bumped an ale cup and all but overset it. “Gods save.”

“The earls in Henas’amef recommend you. So I make you earl of Bryn, and I wish to have all the arms you can find in good order, fit, if war comes to Amefel. As I hope won’t happen, if you build the wall I ask for and build it quickly. I am in great earnest, sir.”

“My lord.” The thane’s own name was Drusenan; and now Earl Drusenan, and this rustic place had become an earl’s estate. A woman who might be Drusenan’s wife had heard and come to his side, drying her hands on her apron; and the new-made earl was still pale and trembling. “What shall I say to this?”

“Say that Tasmôrden will not pass,” Tristen said. “That this road will be protected. That all the lands of Bryn will have justice and good advice.”

“My lord, they will.”

“Then you’ll have done all I ask,” Tristen said, and the new earl set his wife beside him, the woman’s face with a hectic flush and her hands making knots of her apron. She was a lady with work-reddened hands and sweat on her brow, and by the laces of her midriff, swelling with child. Tristen had learned such signs. So the new earl would have an heir to defend. Drusenan, being young, would be earl for years if he lived so long as summer, and that was the question for all this district… for the bridge down the road was a likely place where Tasmôrden’s forces might try to drive straight for Henas’amef by the shortest route.

“Gods save you and your house,” Cevulirn said, the sort of thing Men said to one another, but Tristen had learned he could not utter it… being, Cefwyn had always said, a bad liar… so he simply ducked his head and let Cevulirn pay courtesies in a land that was not his.

Meanwhile the lord’s men had caught up the enthusiasm and brimmed over with it; and in very short time the word slipped out of the small hall on serving boys’ feet… hasting, doubtless, to pass through the village.

No doubt at all, when men turned up at the door, with ale broken out and every house in the village having turned out in the snowy yard. Out of nowhere in particular a piper came to the hall, and the new earl turned out the dogs and cleared back the tables, making a small space in which the determined might dance.

It was a commotion about the event which Tristen had not foreseen, though he said to himself it was foolish not to have realized how quickly word would spread and how excitedly Men would receive it. The dancing imperiled the best pots and a persistent dog, both of which the new earl’s lady hastened out of the way… and the ale flowed free with noise and commotion until the mid of the night, or so it seemed to saddle-weary men with a long ride tomorrow.

But none of the Ivanim was drunk, nor were the Guelens, not nearly so much as the villagers… for, as Cevulirn had said under the cover of the noise, “I trust our host, but I don’t know our host. That says all.”

The drunkenness, however, grew noisy and inept among the villagers, and continued in the yard, after the new lady of Bryn chased out the celebrants in favor of pallets for the soldiers and a bed for their noble visitors.

“We’ve ample place for ourselves,” young Bryn said. “Take our hospitality and our bed in the upstairs, and welcome, very welcome.”

For his part, Tristen, and, he was sure, Cevulirn, would have far rather spread a pallet near the men he knew and trusted. But how was it possible to refuse when the couple, having received such an honor from him, was so set upon offering their best? And when this was the man to whom he had entrusted the sleep of an entire district of Amefel, should he not cast himself on his decision and trust the man?

“Thank you,” Tristen said, and the lady without a word rose and began to lead the way.

A word, a single word, passed between Cevulirn and his lieutenant: wariness still, on Cevulirn’s part, and Tristen bent his attention to the gray space on the instant.

Nothing. Nothing but the sense of Men in the vicinity, some dulled and sleep-beguiled, others not, and anxious… but how should Men not be, when their peace was so disturbed? He trod the worn wooden stairs up to the loft, with the new lady of Bryn in the lead, and Cevulirn went behind him.

The hall offered a floor for men to sleep on, and so the men would, but a sort of bedchamber was snugged in as a half loft above, wooden-floored, and lit and warmed by the light of the fire in the hall downstairs. It was a sensible and comfortable arrangement, assuring warmth and even a certain dim light, which was not the case in most rooms in the Zeide.

There the lady left them. Cevulirn never needed say aloud that he was ill at ease in this separation from his men… Cevulirn, who had a little of the wizard-gift, and perhaps a sense of things in the gray space, still was a troubled presence.

“I find no threat to us,” Tristen said aloud, and Cevulirn said nothing, but cast him a resolutely comforted glance and sat down and took off his boots.

Tristen did the same, all the while listening, listening, surmising the anxiousness he still felt was the villagers’ anxiety, and most of all the new-made lord’s and his lady’s, all disturbed at the storm that had swept down on their peace. Drusenan might be troubled at his lord’s banishment and fall; at his own accession to unexpected heights in the same brief space. He might be mulling over the instruction to muster and build. All these things were possibly in Drusenan’s agitated mind, and two wizard-gifts in their midst could only gather it up with unusual force. And their concern might cause others’ concern by their frowns.

Yet the house did settle, and the presences in the house went out one by one as the fire downstairs was banked. Tristen settled beside Cevulirn in the soft feather bed. For a short time they talked of the river and the bridges, and then fell away to a mutual silence, both of them courting sleep in a house which had grown quiet and dim around them.

Cevulirn at last dropped off to a faint, drowsing presence, a light sleep, it was: Tristen was aware of presence, and that meant some awareness lingered. He himself failed to rest quite as easily, still uneasy in the unfamiliarity around him and in his responsibility… and in his daylong separation from Uwen, who had been beside him or accessible to him almost since he had come among Men. He found himself wondering what Uwen Lewen’s-son might be up to in Henas’amef, how his first day of solitary command of the town might have gone; whether he was asleep, by now, in his bed, and whether Uwen also missed him.

Such questions he might satisfy. He might reach out to Emuin, from here, and through Emuin learn at least some things; but a thought prevented him: that they were a day closer to the river now, and that more powerful effort meant more exposure to wizardry than he liked.

He felt strangely unprotected, despite his access to wizardry, despite the sword on the floor next his bedside, despite the very formidable companion asleep at his side, one of the bravest and most skillful fighters in all Ylesuin, and despite all the guards below. He had not even brought Lusin and Syllan and his ordinary guard on this venture, but rather his night guard, good men, all, and brave and loyal to him, taking turn about bearing the ducal banner. Lusin and the rest of his day guard had come to have other duties more essential than standing at his door, and were more and more absent, one or the other managing the domestic things about the Zeide that they had come to manage very well, becoming the extra hands and eyes he had come to need so much in dealing with the ordinary business of the place.

Least of all could he withdraw those men at the very time Uwen might need them. And there was no reason to fear for himself, not with Cevulirn beside him, though the unaccustomed presence kept him from sleep.

So he rested, gazing at the eye-teasing glow of a distant banked fire on unfamiliar rafters, beams so low he could all but touch them. The same beams extended out over the hall where his men were sleeping, and he watched shadows move among the beams, tame and well-behaved shadows, as it happened, nothing ill feeling at all about the house itself.

He looked further into the shadows and saw the Lines that established the house, all well made, some brighter and older than others. That meant the house had known several changes, but each had observed the Lines of the one before, so far as his sleepy inquiry could ascertain.

He shut his eyes, courting sleep now with a determined wish, considering how long a ride they had on the morrow, on snowy roads.

But something else touched him, light as a summer breeze, awareness of lives, the way he was aware of a hawk aloft or a badger under a ledge, a horse in the stable, or men slipping about something very, very quietly out in the yard.

He listened to it, and asked himself was it innocent? And should he wake Cevulirn?

At the very thought, Cevulirn was awake, and a presence strong as a lit candle in the dark.

“Something’s outside,” Tristen whispered, and they both, having slept mostly dressed, put on their boots and took up their cloaks and their swords in the dimness of the loft.

There was not as yet any reason to call out an alarm to all the men below. They two came down the worn wooden stairs, the fire in the downstairs fireplace lighting the stairs just enough for night-accustomed eyes.

And just so the light showed a shadowy, cloaked figure, the new-made earl closing his front door, after a look or a venture into the yard outside.

Young Drusenan looked around, and up, saw them both, and stood stricken and still, on all sides of him a carpet of Ivanim guard sleeping, but not ale-dulled enough a spoken word would not rouse them.

Tristen came the rest of the way down the steps, sword bare in his hand, and Cevulirn joined him. No one had made a sound. The wife was awake, and had come out of her curtained nook, her braids all undone.

The earl might have been seeing to a horse, or himself investigating the unease outside, but the stricken look on his face said otherwise, and he had not the face to lie.

And now, roused by the faint sounds of their movements, one man of the guard stirred, and after that two, and half a dozen, and all the rest, reaching after arms and rising to cast long shadows around the walls.

Drusenan’s face showed a pale sweat in the firelight. His wife wove her way through the guards, her hair unbound, a shawl about her, and reached her husband’s side.

“I hear something,” Tristen said, for there was a stirring, remote from him. Others looked puzzled, and Cevulirn looked doubtful. But Drusenan drew a breath like a man meeting cold water.

“My lord, the truth: I have other visitors… fugitives, helpless fugitives out of Elwynor. I should have confessed it, but I’d sworn to keep them secret, on my honor, my lord, and how could I break my oath? They’re by no means enemies of yours. Women and children, old men. We’ve fed them, given them warmth in the cold.”

“Hardly a surprise,” muttered Cevulirn. “So I’m sure the borderers do and have always done.”

So Ninévrisë’s father’s company had found Amefel their natural recourse, and gained help from the village of Emwy. Likewise the rebel Caswyddian had crossed, pursuing, and foraged off Amefin land, bringing death with him. There was no way to tell Elwynim friend from Elwynim foe when they all came for shelter and killed one another on Amefin soil.

“I beg my lord’s mercy,” the wife said, and added, faintly, “Lord, I am Elwynim, and have a cousin with them. How could I turn her away?”

“Blood is mixed here,” Drusenan said. “And kinship binds us, even with other loyalties we keep. Your Grace, in your own good heart, help them. Shelter them. Feed them.”

Feed my sparrows, Auld Syes had said.

These were Auld Syes’ birds. The gray space echoed with the memory, the witch of Emwy, the uprooted oak.

“Show me these fugitives,” he said.

Chapter 2

There were indeed mostly women with small children, bundled against the cold, and very frightened to be hunted out of their refuge in the stable. They had been warm and snug among the many horses that had filled the stalls and the aisle. Now they stood exposed to view of armed men, roused out into the wind and shivering with fright.

“Small wonder the village wanted to stable the horses,” Cevulirn said dryly. Since it was never the Ivanim habit to surrender that task to anyone, Tristen had no trouble guessing, the fugitives had had to hide elsewhere until the visitors were all abed. Then they had come creeping back to the lifesaving warmth, where hay and horses far in excess of the stable’s capacity had made a very warm haven until the dawn.

And that was the mysterious coming and going in the night he had heard, the sense of presence more than he had accounted for, that had kept him awake.

But they were not a warlike group… less than a score in number, one a babe in arms, the rest anonymous bundles of heavy cloaks and wraps of every sort, at least three others of them children.

“They are no threat,” Tristen said.

“Until asked questions by those who are,” Cevulirn said. “Best not to have them on this route to the river, where they see all the coming and going of your supply. Bryn’s villagers know where to go if trouble comes. These have fewer resources.”

To have a contingent of Elwynim next Henas’amef or within it was no comfort, either. A gathering of Elwynim fugitives, however pitiful, afforded a resting place where Elwynim spies might come and go. There was nowhere completely safe to settle them, none of the river villages within reach wherein an Elwynim band that might include those sympathetic to Tasmôrden could not work some sort of harm: lights and signals, even daggers in the night, or at very least, one taking to his heels to go back across the river with news.

Yet the wind blew with a whisper to his thoughts…

What had Auld Syes said? Magic had a way of diverting one’s attention, the things most needful to know slipping through one’s fingers like water.

The living king at last sits in judgment.

And again, which he had already remembered: When you find my sparrows, my little birds, lord of Amefel, warm them, feed them. The wind is too cold.

Birds before the storm, not his birds, not the fat, silly pigeons that he daily fed at his windowsill, the foolish pigeons which had won him the Holy Father’s ire in Guelemara, on account of the Quinaltine steps. No, these were certainly those other birds, Auld Syes’ sparrows, come to him in want of shelter.

And wherefore should prudent birds lack shelter? When their nests were windblown down, when their homes were destroyed, when armies marched and villages burned and greedy men seized power. Those were the birds that flew on Auld Syes’ storm… the winds blew, edged with winter and killing, and there was magic and wizardry behind his coming here and these fugitives seeking help of him.

And what direction would Elwynim loyal to Ninévrisë run?

They would never go to Guelessar for refuge, that was certain. Their lady Ninévrisë might have wed Cefwyn and might have Cefwyn’s promise of aid, but for Elwynim noble or common to cross the river and deliver themselves into the hands of Guelenmen, their old enemies, that, they feared more than they feared Tasmôrden’s army.

No, if Elwynim sought shelter, of course they would seek it among a folk allied by blood and history. Of course they would go south; and that was the duty Auld Syes had laid on him, to receive these folk and safeguard them, no matter what happened within Elwynor.

He looked at the pitiful band by torchlight, helpless and shivering, a close-wrapped band that looked for all the world like drab winter birds, and all looked fearfully at him, who held their lives and safety in his hands.

“Let’s go back to the stables,” he said, “out of the wind. That first. And you’ll tell me what brought you here. I’ll protect you, but if you wish me to, tell me the truth.” He had not forgotten how Crissand’s father Edwyll had contrived with Tasmôrden, who had promised to send Elwynim forces across the river… and indeed, in these, Tasmôrden had, but a force of the starving and desperate, whom Tasmôrden would be well content to see plundering Amefin resources: such cruelty he added to the tally of Tasmôrden’s doings.

“Light a lantern,” he said at the stable door… they should not bring the fire-dripping torches inside with the hay. And a man found a lantern and lit it, so they could go in among sleepy horses, gray and brown backs pressed side by side, and wary dark eyes shining back the lamplight in wonder what Men were doing.

Within the stable, barriered against the wind and in the warmth of so many horses and the bedding straw, Tristen appropriated a stack of grain sacks for a ducal seat; Cevulirn chose a barrel.

Drusenan stood and held the lantern himself, a circle of light which fell on faces that, indeed, freed of their muffling wraps, were all women, old men, and children.

“This is Tristen of Ynefel, our new lord duke of Amefel,” Drusenan said, “and this is Duke Cevulirn of Ivanor, who’s the best of the lords of the south, and they ask me why I’ve sheltered you.”

“Our homes are burned, lords!” came the anguished reply. And from another: “We had no choice but cross to Amefel!”

“Where is your home?” Tristen asked quietly.

“Nithen, lord.” A young woman spoke, a thin woman bearing a recent and ugly scar of burns on a hand clenched on her cloak of straw-flecked wool. “We come from Nithen district, mostly. One from Criess.” Another head nodded, a young woman with a closely bundled child at her skirts. “Tasmôrden’s men took our stock and our seed grain. We couldn’t live there.”

“My cousin,” Drusenan’s young wife spoke up. “Where else should she go, but to me?”

“Wife,” Drusenan interposed; and then with a glance at his judges: “So they came for food, harmless and unarmed. How could we refuse them?”

Tristen was ignorant of farmers and shepherds, but he knew the map of Elwynor, such as they had. Nithen was not on the map he had, but Criess was, near the border. Cevulirn, however, asked shrewd and knowledgeable questions of the fugitives, how large a village was Nithen, what was its sustenance, where were the men… and how many men they had seen making the assault, riding what sort of horses, whether they had killed the men of the villages or forced them into service. All these things Cevulirn asked, and yes, there had been perhaps a hundred, and they had taken some men of various villages to serve Tasmôrden, but some who resisted, they had killed. An old man from Nithen had lost a son, and others shouted out their own losses with tears and anger.

Cevulirn’s questions quickly assumed a shape in Tristen’s understanding, an image of the number and condition of the enemy and the very weather of the day they had moved through the district. All the significance of Cevulirn’s questions Unfolded to him in troublingly vivid order, and told him when, and how, and with what result. And he wished calm and comfort on the innocent.

“When Tasmôrden marched on the capital,” Tristen said, “he went through Nithen; and that was above a fortnight past, is that so?” He was convinced both that they told the truth and that pity was justified for these desperate people. Nithen was a hamlet attached to Ilefínian, an estate of the Lord Regent himself.

And as for the day on which these folk had crossed over, no, they replied to his question, they were aware of no muster of Tasmôrden’s forces to the border to aid any Amefin rebellion: it had all poured in on Ilefínian.

So Tasmôrden’s promises of support to Edwyll were indeed a lie: only this hungry and desperate band had crossed the river, allowed to escape not out of mercy, but because their presence and that of other disordered bands of refugees might just as well aid Tasmôrden with no expenditure of troops. They might be a burden on Amefel’s supplies, perhaps would steal from Amefin villages—at best, given Tasmôrden’s promises to Edwyll and the rest, might confuse the king’s troops. They were cast away to die.

But pitiful as they were, he would not be surprised if armed men began to flee the war and cross, too, and some of them might be Tasmôrden’s men.

Most certainly, on Cevulirn’s advice and his own clear sense, he should not leave these folk here to multiply on his supply route to the border.

And if Modeyneth was the village with connection to them, Modeyneth would still willingly feed them, Auld Syes’ sparrows…

And what better refuge than in Emwy district, which was in Auld Syes’ hands and under her potent wards, hers, and the late Lord Regent’s? Ninévrisë’s father, though a Shadow now, would know the true from the false.

“West of Modeyneth, in the hills,” he said, “the war will not so likely come. There are walls and vaults at Althalen that would keep the wind out, and if we sent canvas and timbers, the old walls could well shelter them. I know the place is well warded against harm from the outside.” He did not add that he himself would know sure as a shout and as instantly if any untoward thing happened there… he did not think there could be any intrusion at Althalen without his knowing it.

“Your Grace,” Drusenan protested. “It’s forbidden even to set foot in that place.”

“So much the safer. I don’t forbid it, and I’m lord of the place.”

“The king forbade it, as he forbade—” It was to Drusenan’s credit that he forbore to say, the wall.

“The king is my friend, and I know he’d bring these folk to Althalen himself if trouble threatened. There’s nothing harmful there, not to the harmless. A little girl rules it, and the Lord Regent. If you can manage only canvas and straw, they’ll be safe and warm within the walls. The stone there is thick, and reflects warmth if they have a fire.”

“If they had leave to cut wood…” Drusenan said.

“Plenty grows there.”

“If we had your leave to cut it, my lord.”

Why should you need it? he all but asked, but from Guelessar’s example, he understood the jealousy with which lords guarded their wooded lands… and he knew the reason of it, that indiscriminate cutting would ruin the land and kill the game. “You have my leave,” he said, looking at the women, “and if there should be haunts, don’t fear them. Uleman’s grave is there. The wards of that place are stronger than any common place.”

The Regent’s name greatly affected the women. One seized his hand, pressing her brow to it, hugging it to her.

“Gods bless Your Grace.” The woman’s wounded hands clasped on his so he could not force them off without touching seared flesh. She bore amulets, he saw as her shawl fell open, much like Auld Syes. She was a witch, but had no power, or none that he could feel. Cevulirn had far more, and glowed softly in the gray space. He touched her hands, wished her flesh to heal as soon as possible, and with no more hardship. She pressed her tearful face against his hand, and fell to her knees… he hoped because he had done some good.

“The king’s law forbids settlement at Althalen,” Cevulirn said in a hushed voice, at his other hand, “so you should know, Amefel, though I agree His Majesty would ride right over that law at his need. The king’s law also forbids the raising of walls and defenses in Amefel.”

“Is it all Cefwyn’s law?”

“His grandfather’s.”

That was very different. “His giving me the banner of Althalen was against his grandfather’s law, too, but he did, all the same. And he told me do justice, and I swore to him to do it. So I have to find these people a place.” Tristen cast a look at Drusenan. “Settle them there tomorrow. Quickly as you may.” It struck him between the lordship, the wall, and the fugitives that he had settled a double and a triple burden on Modeyneth. “Don’t bear it alone. Call on the help of all Bryn’s resources, up to the walls of Henas’amef and inside, and tomorrow send to all of Bryn and say this is my instruction, and the council decree says the same.”

“My lord.” There was fervent intent in Drusenan’s voice. “I swear it. And your wall you shall have, my lord.”

“With a gate in it, and two towers for archers.” He had in mind exactly how he wished it would look, smooth white stone, with great towers; but he knew sensibly that in haste and with unskilled labor, it would be rough stone and wood.

“There is the ruin there,” said Drusenan. “There, shall we build? Of the old stone?”

He was confounded for a moment, and then Cevulirn said, “Whatever serves to raise that wall faster, I think His Grace will approve.”

They went inside, and back up to their chilled blankets, he and Cevulirn, while the men settled in the lower hall, with understanding, now, of the village secrets and the loyalty of Bryn, alike.

“A wall has stood there,” Cevulirn said, “where you direct the wall to be. It’s on the oldest maps. Did you know?”

“A Sihhë one?” He had not known. He was troubled to think so, but not altogether so.

“Barrakkêth raised it, and at other…”

… points in the hills, Cevulirn said, but he already knew what Cevulirn would say. He could see his wall as he had seen it in planning, a string of small outposts which in some degree corresponded with the villages that stood there now, linking a series of steep-faced hills.

These villages had once been a source of supply to powerful garrisons. That had been the importance of Bryn, their ancient duty to the Sihhë kings. That was the source of their prominence in Amefel. The system of defenses Unfolded to him, with unwalled Althalen in the heart of such a bristle of defenses no enemy could prevail…

Instead Althalen had rotted at the heart, and the interest of the halfling kings in the people that toiled in uninteresting peace in the countryside had failed: long peace, and stability, and long, long dearth of ambition or purpose in existence.

Had it been good… or otherwise… for the villages under their rule?

Crissand spoke for the villages, and understood the farmers, and pleaded for attention to them. Crissand… aetheling, by the same blood Cuthan shared, that might even run in Drusenan of Bryn.

He said nothing after that, only felt a chill through the blankets and his clothing and despite the body lying next to him.

What had he done, in ordering these things? One moment he had been sure; and now he lay close to shivering at the thought of what he had commanded to exist, and at a title he had all but promised to bestow.

He, who had read the Book that Mauryl had given him… or that Mauryl had returned to him, whichever was the case: Barrakkêth’s book, outlining the principles of magic, the fluid character of time and place, on which wizards so profoundly depended and which they attempted to nail in place.

False, Barrakkêth would say: nothing is so certain. The patterns were what mattered. The patterns and not the substance. A village is the realm, the realm a village, and the kingdom fares as well as any of its parts.

Might he then heal Althalen?

In a morning aglow with clouds, they brought out their horses, disturbing the sleep of the exiles from Elwynor. The village wives had made a great pot of porridge in the open air, and every man and every villager and the fugitives as well had hot porridge steaming in the wintry breeze. Faces stung red with cold all bore smiles this morning.

“Fare well,” everyone called after them when they set out, and “Gods keep Your Lordship and Your Grace!” wafted after them as they rode out. “Gods save Amefel and gods save Ivanor! And gods save the lord of Bryn!”

The new lord of Bryn rode with them a short way to the two hills in the distance. It was a stream-riven cut through a wall of similar hills, and a shallow ford near two graceful, winter-bare beeches.

And there, too, icicled and snow-bedight, stood the ruin of two towers, one on either side, rock cut from the two hills. The quarry, too, was picked out in snow on the nearer hill.

“My wall,” Tristen said, amazed at how exactly it answered to his vision. He could imagine the fallen blocks in place, and the gates of bronze, figured with forbidding faces.

“Gates to let honest comers through,” he said to Drusenan. “And men to stand guard.”

“With the old stone already cut,” the new earl said, “by spring your towers will stand.” Then Drusenan added, “As a boy I played among these hills, in and out these towers. So with every boy in Modeyneth. We made troops and fought battles.”

“Against whom?” Having never been a boy, he could scarcely imagine what boys knew or did.

“Oh, the sheep. Scores of enemies.”

“Guelens,” Cevulirn supplied wryly, not a Guelen himself, and drew a chagrined look from the young lord of Bryn.

“I think so we imagined,” Drusenan said.

“This time, against Tasmôrden,” Tristen said quietly, uncertain of the currents that flowed here. “But not against the like of those folk you shelter. I’ll give orders to Captain Anwyll at the river to watch out for others. He’s a good man, and if he comes here, as he and his messengers must, trust him. His reports will do you no harm.”

“I take your word, my lord, with all goodwill. As I give you mine. What more can words do?”

In such small exchanges of politeness Tristen found himself lost more than not, but in this saying, in this moment between himself and the new lord of Bryn, he felt the currents in the gray space moving and roiled, and the very stones so tinged with power he could draw it into his nostrils along with the scent of snow and cold rock.

He looked up the snowy rock face, and at the towers, and at the skeletal beeches, which were not part of his vision.

Green things had come here and grown in peace; and a barren place looming with threat had existed only for the games of children and the pasturage of sheep for decades.

His orders changed it back. It would stand and threaten again, and children would not play here: soldiers would stand guard; and a forbidden wall would stand here as it had stood before. He rode along it, eyes at times shut to the wall as it was, but old Lines answered him, old Lines leapt up at his touch, and would grow stronger with the work of Men’s hands.

Cefwyn would forgive him. Cefwyn forgave him and would forgive, no matter the mind of his northern barons.

“I had not thought,” Tristen said to Cevulirn as they rode away to the north, leaving the lord of Bryn to his task, “I had not even known stones had stood there when I ordered it. What brought it down? Do you know?”

“Oh, easily. Selwyn Marhanen,ordered the Amefin fortresses cast down… and the northern defenses went with them. Folly,” Cevulirn said to the brisk rhythm of the horses at a walk, “folly to have dismantled the defenses with Elwynor continually at war, but the prospect of having the wall held from the other side doubtless entered into the king’s decision.”

If that were so, the Elwynim would have seized territory far into Amefel… and by the Red Chronicle, there had been Amefin who hoped for that, many of them.

“You’ve given leave for the raising of walls,” Cevulirn said. “But Cefwyn will agree, I think, and best the word of it reach him quietly. The northern barons certainly won’t like it. And His Majesty should know beforehand and not be surprised by your breaches of law.”

“Yes,” he said, determined to send a messenger on the heels of the last, as soon as he reached home and the most direct route.

But his wall, he was resolved, should stand, and even in its early stages, would check any advance by way of the main road toward Henas’amef.

And with small intrusions stopped, and only the sheepwalks and the meadows and stony hillsides for a route into the land, no large force could move with any speed, certainly none with the great engines Cefwyn feared. Henas’amef’s old walls were not fit for modern war, so Cefwyn had said; and unhappily, neither was Ilefínian across the river, so Ninévrisë had said.

Walls built for magic, Cefwyn had also said. In those days, in their pride, the halfling Sihhë had had even Althalen as an unwalled city, and trusted to their magic.

So he had done, and whether Cevulirn had guessed what he did, he had no knowledge. All wishes aided the wards, and he thought he had had wishes from that quarter, such as they were.

Oh, he longed for leave to be riding this road with a troop of light cavalry, more than followed them now… as he would, if Cefwyn had simply failed to forbid him.

And all along the way his eyes swept the snow-bleached hills for likely routes and lookouts.

Cevulirn, too, saw more than spoke.

They paused to change about horses in due course, and by noon, at a place where signs said Anwyll had camped even last night, they shared the bread and cheese the village had sent with them, Cevulirn’s men grown easier, and more inclined to laughter in the evident success of their venture in this snowy land.

By afternoon the road had passed through that ridge of hills that contained the Lenúalim’s broad stream; their riding began to be generally downhill, easier on the horses. From one last rise they could see far and wide across the land, to the sunset and white hills and the small woods, and the smoke of village fires somewhat to the darkening east.

Here, too, was a sight that Unfolded names and places: Asfiad, and Edlinnadd, but when he asked Cevulirn whether the names were thus, Cevulirn said Aswyth and Ellinan were the names.

So it was like reading the Book, written in a hand he had not recognized until the words themselves came back, and then it seemed he had known not alone the hand, but every flaw in the pages, every place where the hand had compromised a letter to avoid a roughness.

So when he thought of Asfiad, he thought of a well and a dark-eyed woman, as if it were yesterday, and he shivered in the cold wind the evening sent, under a gray and fading sky. All the colors of the sunset had faded.

Yet he knew this land, and so the river shore Unfolded to him, never seen but there in his heart of hearts… indeed he had pored over maps before this, and had sure knowledge of some of the places; but now it spread out, winterbound, and white, dulled with evening, and full of names not in the maps, memories of springtime and summer and autumn so vivid they took his breath.

“We may not reach the camp,” Cevulirn said, “but Anwyll must have gotten there. He’s had good luck with the carts.”

The oxcarts carried a great deal, but moved excruciatingly slowly: would move slowly on their way to Guelessar, too, and the weather was a question. Tristen considered the matter of Cefwyn’s carts, gazing out above red Gery’s ears. Sometimes he thought he rode black Dys, which was foolish: Dys was at home. Sometimes, too, he heard the rumble of armor, which was surely the recollection of Lewenbrook: the noise of the muster of the south and the heavy horse at full charge, armor a-rattle and hooves beating on late-summer sod. Had this place ever seen a battle?

But underfoot this evening was the soft, crisp fracture of unblemished snow under Gery’s feet, a walking pace beside Cevulirn’s gray, the banners all furled now that they were in desolate territory, with no eye to see.

He shivered despite the thick cloak. Perhaps it was like the wall, like the Book, and Mauryl’s spell that had Called him into the world was written everywhere across the land, ready to Unfold to him with frightening immediacy.

There was little time, something kept saying to him: there was so little time to seize this Pattern and make it move as he wished.

Chapter 3

To the royal desk came all the accustomed trivia and the daily urgencies that faced the Crown: the proposed fishing weirs across Lissenbrook, among the accounting of fletchers requesting goose quills, which Cefwyn saw no reason should rise above the level of concern of the Commander of the Guard, except he had asked to be informed of any deficiency in the preparations or the movement of carts.

Besides that small crisis of goose feathers, he had a report from the royal forester regarding the condition and take of deer from the royal preserve, in a winter not as bitter as feared, the condition of the forest and the abundance of hare.

And from a tenant the usual complaint of foxes making depredations into domestic stores, and a request to hunt them. Besides there was a wall wanting mending in Imor, on royal lands he had not seen since taking the throne and which he despaired of seeing in the future: he loved that hunting lodge and its command of the southern hills.

He thought of the woods near Wys, saw in his mind’s eye the afternoon light coming through winter branches. He smelled the moist, sweet air after a snowfall… and envied the life of the foresters who had the care of it for their sole duty, hunting deer, when his own task was, endlessly, fruitlessly, hunting Elwynim rebels.

What would it be, to know on rising for the day, that one’s duty was to walk in the woods, take account of deer and hare and badger, watch the flight of the birds and understand the weather? He was sure the office was somewhat more troublesome than that: no life was as simple as it seemed. But what did the forester think? Did he think how splendid it would be to be the king, and rise leisured to the worship of countless courtiers, dine from a golden service, and be fawned upon continually?

The golden service was true, but golden cups made hot tea go cold. He preferred humble pottery, thought it luxurious for a king otherwise damned to cold tea, and maintained a set of the cheapest by the fireside. As for the fawning… ask Ryssand. A morning where the letters abounded with nothing more grievous than fishing rights or requests for petty permissions was itself luxury, compared to the convolute dealings of his lords, and gods save him, his almoner, who he knew was only waiting his chance for complaint.

He did not hold audiences often enough. Men had no choice but to approach him with letters, and Emuin reproached him for it. But it was far quicker to read about the foxes than to hear about them from some dyspeptic squire who’d had to wait his turn in a cold audience hall. The Sihhë-lords themselves had insisted on written petition, and had had an immense archive of records… which had flamed up mightily in the fall of Althalen, so he supposed: all that efficiency and good order sent up in smoke in an hour by his grandfather, who came of a sturdy people whose farmers felt entitled to complain to the king and send him gifts. Denied, they sent him letters, and more letters, paying a clerk, or worse, a priest, to write them up fair if they had no skill to do so.

And if the High King of Althalen had heard his common farmers and paid attention, Emuin had said peevishly, he might have heard what would have saved him and his realm from your grandfather, who at least listened to his farmers, for all his other faults. Paper and parchment are no substitute for faces and the sight of fields.

They were not a substitute. And when he thought of it, he had rather look at turnip fields than the face of Lord Murandys. But common farmers did not easily get past the guards of the Guelesfort these days. The great barons had ceased to rub sleeves with such common fellows, during his father’s reign, except on feast days.

“Your Majesty.” A page flitted near. “The Lord Commander is here.”

A page had kept the Lord Commander standing in the foyer. His staff had taken his admonition to preserve the king’s privacy for his slugabed bride a shade too literally.

The page proffered a sealed letter, with Ryssand’s colors.

All the ease went out of him. “I’ll see the Lord Commander,” he said, and in the same moment his bride came through the door from the inner chambers, a second dawn in his day. He had read, waiting for her; and now…

“Idrys is on his way in,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“Ilefínian,” she surmised in immediate concern.

“No. I don’t think so. But Ryssand is no good news. Sit by me.”

Idrys arrived in the room before she had quite seated herself, Idrys, Lord Commander of the household, the black harbinger of disaster.

“Ryssand dares send to me,” Cefwyn said, taking up his knife to loose the seal. “Do you know what the matter is?”

The seal proved breached. Idrys regularly did so. It was his duty to know.

“I confess so,” Idrys said. “But Your Majesty should read it.”

A moderately bland missive, until his eye struck the line:

seeking Your Majesty’s understanding regarding the actions of Your Majesty’s obedient subject in Amefel, in the protection of Your Majesty’s interests…

and then:

I seek an early audience for a man Your Majesty once favored with his trust on matters of utmost urgency…

He looked up at Idrys, already angry… not at the news, which was not news to him, but at the brazenness of it. “He’s speaking for Parsynan … I sent him from court on that account. How dare he?”

“Oh, read to the end.”

He read further, finding a formal complaint of Tristen’s theft of Parsynan’s property and charges of threats against a Crown officer’s life.

“Am I surprised? Recount to me the causes whereby I am surprised at this sweet union of purpose, master crow. Parsynan and Ryssand! I’m only astonished at my credulity, taking this man’s recommendations to put that damned thief in office in the first place! Good loving gods!”

“The gods are allied with His Holiness, one would suppose… and that devotion is still firmly bought. I do keep an ear to it.”

“Gods hope.” He scanned the letter. “Abuse of his person. Sorcery aiming at Parsynan’s life?”

“His horse threw him.”

That was there to read. Indeed, oh, and the innocent horse had been ensorcelled to do murder on Lord Parsynan, as the rioting Amefin, encouraged by Bryalt priests, had assaulted a king’s officer in the streets of Henas’amef.

That could be believed. So, for that matter, could the actions of the horse, but it was not sorcery, if Tristen had done it: Emuin, his old tutor, had taught him that fine distinction.

“And Ryssand commits his honor to this complaint,” he asked Idrys.

“Oh, more, more than that, my lord king. Read on.”

… the urgent representation of Your Majesty’s loyal officers who will swear to these facts, as we who have honorably and loyally supported the Crown and the gods are greatly alarmed. We seek redress of grievances and, putting aside our own bitter mourning, wish to consult with Your Majesty regarding measures that may lead to greater, not less, unity of purpose.

“Bother and damnation. Unity of purpose. Bitter mourning. Hell!”

Your Majesty witnessed the circumstances that have left Ryssand bereft, and casting now all our care upon our remaining treasure, our daughter, whose alliance with a powerful house will shield Your Majesty’s Ryssandish province, accordingly we have thought of various alliances. But we deem no union more glorious and none more beneficial to the tranquillity of Ylesuin than to join the Marhanen line to that of Ryssand, forging an alliance that will bring us to the spring in one mind and with one purpose. Accordingly I have written to His Highness…

“Good loving gods! He’s lost all his wits!”

“Which part in particular has caught my lord king’s eye?”

“Is he proposing marriage? Marriage?”

Ninévrisë leaned to see.

“Artisane,” Cefwyn said, “loving gods! To my brother Efanor…”

“I suspect His Highness will be here shortly,” Idrys said in his low voice. “The courier carried two letters to court. And how will my lord king respond to this sage and selfless proposal of peace?”

He lacked words. Launching the army not at Tasmôrden’s forces, but at Ryssand, was ever so fleetingly the wish of his heart. “I detest this man. I truly detest him.”

“Efanor surely doesn’t favor him,” Ninévrisë said. “And Artisane is clever, but not wise.”

“Much like all that house.” The blood ran calmer in Cefwyn’s veins by now, on two further breaths and the consideration that, on the one hand, it was a calculated piece of effrontery, set to make him angry, and on the other hand… that Efanor, while gullible where it came to priests, was nonetheless Marhanen in blood and bone. Efanor was not clever, but he was wise: gentler, but not dull-witted, nor, once the Marhanen temper had slipped the bounds of religious restraint… was gentle Efanor necessarily slow to offense.

And if Ryssand took this insolent letter as a sort of threat, a not so subtle reminder of the scope of his power in Ylesuin, Ryssand sadly mistook both the sons of Ináreddrin.

In fact the commotion at the hall door, which opened to some visitor without overmuch ado of pages, led him to suggest, visitor as yet unseen, that they repair to the adjacent room and the table there. “Your counsel will be welcome,” he said to Idrys, and signaled a page. “Wine and a number of cups. Gods know how far this conference will extend. We may have half the kingdom here before all’s done.” The commotion was imminent in the hallway. Cefwyn rose at some leisure, taking Ninévrisë’s hand, and had not quite settled at the table when Efanor arrived in the room, color high in his face.

Cefwyn sat, Ninévrisë sat, and Idrys, who rarely sat with his king, bowed.

“Brother,” said Efanor. “Your Grace, Lord Commander.” Efanor had a rolled parchment in his fist.

“Brother, good morning,” Cefwyn said. “I take it you’ve received the match of this correspondence.”

“I have,” Efanor said, and took the gestured invitation to join their small council. “I doubt it was in any hope of favorable consideration.”

“And?” Cefwyn asked.

“And I take it as a gibe at you. He clearly expects no good of it,” Efanor said.

“I take it for an outrage,” Ninévrisë said. “The man is your bitter enemy.”

“He is my royal brother’s bitter enemy,” said Efanor airily, which was to say he was angry and pretending calm. “I have fallen from his consideration, and therefore he writes such a large stroke, caring nothing for my opinion. There is Ryssand’s gage, if you will, cast in our faces.”

“Unfortunately,” said Idrys, “we have no adequate reply.”

“I know I have a certain reputation among the northern barons, which I never sought.”

Their father had wished Efanor to rule, but never found the means to secure the throne to his younger, more placid, son. So had Ryssand wished it, once, estimating Efanor would be biddable, lost in his contemplations and his studies. All the world estimated Efanor as a monkish sort, inclined to celibacy and scholarship, and the religiosity that had dominated their grandfather’s later years, in his excessive fear of hell. In Selwyn the court had seen the utmost of religious terror, in his last year.

The truth was that Efanor did not so much fear hell as love his expectations and imaginations of the gods, and yet… and yet at this moment, the clear, steady look Efanor had, the color high in his face, recalled the impish brother who had helped filch sweets from the banquet trays, the brother who had hidden with him in a haystack, frustrating the captain of the Dragon Guard.

“So what if I were to be so gullible as to write to him,” Efanor asked, “as if I believed every word, and considered his offer?”

There was the Efanor who had conspired with him, the Efanor his bride had never met, in the few months of a new kingship. There was his brother. Cefwyn found himself on the one hand all but breaking into a grin.

“That would set the fox in the henhouse,” Idrys had said, who had seen that other Efanor, often… while Ninévrisë sat amazed.

“Ryssand might think twice about what he has and what he might lose,” Efanor said.

“He might think twice and three times,” Ninévrisë said, “but Artisane is a wicked girl. Truly, truly I counsel against this.”

Cefwyn moved his hand to hers. “I would not countenance it,” he said to Efanor, “for one reason: the affront she paid Nevris, whether young Artisane contrived it or whether she only said what her father dictated. I can’t forgive that, or bring her into Nevris’ presence, not for any advantage. Nor will I sacrifice my brother’s happiness.”

“Oh, never a qualm for me, brother. That Her Grace can’t forgive the lady… that’s a difficulty.”

“If I could assure the troops to save my land and my lord’s good heart,” Ninévrisë said, “I’d kiss her and forgive in full view of the court. I account her that little. But for you, dear Efanor, my dear friend, you have a good heart; too good. For your own sake, don’t make light of it. The woman is a serpent, and she has a sting. Gods forbid, that you might ever carry through such a marriage.”

“As for me,” Efanor said, with a ruddy color to the roots of his hair, “my reputation is largely deserved: women have never moved me to the extent…” Efanor’s voice trailed off, but Cefwyn had no reticence.

“You are not tempted to follow me,” Cefwyn said, “in my previous folly.”

“I could remain lastingly indifferent to the lady, and, being good Quinalt, she is chaste.”

Ninévrisë laid her hand on Efanor’s sleeve. “No. Never throw away love.”

“I’m half a monk,” Efanor said, “don’t they say so? What should I lose? And she’s young. She may learn to be pleasant.”

“Pleasant!” Cefwyn said, for he could bear no more.

Efanor gave him one of those glass-clear looks in his turn, innocent as Tristen’s eyes at this challenge to his priests and his holy aspirations. “Kings and princes marry for policy, not love. Would you not have married Luriel, if there were no other prospect? The girl is young, and Quinalt at least in observance, and by the gods’ grace the true faith might give us something in common. Ryssand’s offered. He cannot object to being taken up on it.”

“Gods, what a recommendation of a bride. I’ll not have the brother I love fling himself between me and Ryssand’s ambition.”

“I’d give her no heir,” Efanor said with quiet assurance. “And I assure you’t would be as good as a nunnery and no inconvenience to me. My life is simple… monastic, in most points. It can remain so. And we only speak of responding favorably to Ryssand’s offer… not of the actual marriage. Take Luriel as an example. No marriage resulted.”

He had never imagined such cold depth under Efanor’s calm good humor: somehow, in some way, Ryssand had stirred Efanor’s absolute detestation. Efanor had all but drawn in his defense and Ninévrisë’s, and while Efanor would not take up the sword with any good cheer, this was indeed the brother he knew, who had planned at least half the forays of their childhood… and who had become his enemy when Efanor had believed him guilty of sedition.

Now it was Ryssand who had made Efanor angry. And monkish Efanor might style himself, but he was Marhanen.

“I will countenance a courtship,” Cefwyn said, “but never a marriage. I will find fault with it. I’ll find some flaw in any arrangement.”

“As they did,” Ninévrisë said. “And yet we married.”

“Because we willed to marry, as gods know Efanor has no such desire. Gods. Gods. Idrys, you’ve been silent. What say you?”

“That nothing Ryssand plans favors anyone but Ryssand. But I’m not sure he’s planned His Highness’s acceptance. That will worry him.”

“Write,” Cefwyn said to Efanor, “and I shall. His own damnable arrogance may lead him to believe we think it a good idea. But gods save us, Nevris, if that baggage ever affronts you in the remotest… I’ll have her head and her father’s.”

“That baggage is feared, mark me. Cleisynde fears her, as much as follows her. But Luriel—”

“Luriel hates her cousin, and always has.”

“Luriel is new-crowned queen of all eyes.” Ninévrisë said, “and is also clever, but not wise; and there have been great changes since Artisane left. If Artisane returns, when Luriel’s all a-flurry over Panys and a prospect of her grand wedding, and all of us stitching on Luriel’s wedding gown, oh, now there’s the fox and the weasel in the same sack, with the neck tied.”

He had had small understanding of the women’s court, which he had thought of as sheep without a shepherd since Efanor’s mother’s death. Weasels in a sack seemed more apt since Ninévrisë’s ascendancy.

And he gave what Ninévrisë said his careful consideration, for while Artisane and Luriel led no troops, wielded no swords, nor had good Quinalt ladies a voice in the councils of state, a quarrel between the niece of Murandys and the daughter of Ryssand would unsettle the relationship between those two houses. And that relationship, however unholy their recent acts, was the rock on which the north was built.

It was also the reef on which the kingdom might shipwreck itself for good and all. Quarrels in the women’s court where the king could not directly intervene had their own potency.

“If Luriel gained a firm rule over Artisane,” Cefwyn said, “the whole kingdom would be the safer. But neither the fox nor the weasel ”will threaten you, Nevris, and that I swear. There is one intervention I can make in your secret realm upstairs, and that is to see Luriel in one convent and Artisane in another at the other end of Ylesuin if ever you find their quarrels tiresome. You may not be queen of Ylesuin, but by the blessed gods the ladies of this court will know they have you to please, and none other.—So likewise for your peace, brother. I swear it, quite, quite solemnly.”

“So shall we disturb Ryssand’s?” Efanor asked with—Cefwyn could all but see it—the old sparkle in the eye and the old flare of the nostril that meant Efanor had decided and was bent on the deed.

“Be careful,” Ninévrisë wished them both, and from Idrys, that dark eminence: “Hear her. Very carefully hear her, my lord king.”

By evening of an easy ride, Tristen at Cevulirn’s side came in sight of the river and of the camp, orderly rows of tents beneath their high vantage on the hill: there was one of the several bridges that led into Amefel… or its pylons and framing, for the deck was stripped of planking and that planking stored on this side of the river in sections, under guard. There was the camp, long-established with several sheds and a small company of guards, that had maintained their guard over the bridge before Anwyll had come here. Now the sheds that must have been all the camp were swallowed up in the brown and gray tenting that spread along the shore, and the fires which before now must have been modest and few sent up a blue haze of smoke which hung low above the water.

There, too, across the river, was their first view of Elwynor, a shore that, far from being ominous, looked very like their own, with snowy low hills and wooded crests. There, Tristen said to himself, there was Ninévrisë’s kingdom. Ilefínian, under siege, lay far away over the hills. The dark Lenúalim, which had lapped like an old serpent about the stones of Ynefel in the spring and summer, ran here as a broad, cold river, sided by ice.

They rode down toward the camp in a light sifting of snow from the heavens. Banners unfurled, and showed to the camp who had come, which sent the soldiers scrambling to their feet. Men ran, and the camp answered with a brisk and anxious welcome.

Captain Anwyll, only just arrived himself, came half-dressed from the largest tent to meet them in the main aisle of the camp.

“Your lordships,” Anwyll said, looking up at them on their horses. Anwyll’s breath steamed in small, hurried puffs. “Is there trouble?”

“No. Only a visitor to see the camp,” Tristen said, for he had no complaint of what he saw. “His Grace of Ivanor has come to see our situation.”

“Honored,” Anwyll said, though most likely, Tristen thought, their visit was not entirely welcome tonight, while order was not complete; Anwyll still looked distressed and caught at a loss. But he sent for a cloak and his coat and showed them about his small command.

“I’d see the bridge,” Cevulirn said, “the captain’s good grace extending that far.”

Anwyll cast Tristen a glance as if to see was there contradiction, and receiving nothing contrary, led them to the bridgehead, where great timbers stood skeletal against the wintry sunset and the empty pylons stood tied by timbers, which alone lent the structure strength.

“There’s some concern about the spring flood,” Anwyll said, “We’ve the planking under guard; I’m told we should cross-brace when the floods come if the decking’s not in place by then.”

If they lost pylons or decking, they could not cross without considerable delay and difficulty; and Tasmôrden would very much aim at that destruction if he could spare the men from his siege: the bridges might well be his next attack.

“By no means must we let the bridges go,” he said. Anwyll was shivering, and sneezed in reply. “Be well,” he said, and Anwyll blessed himself with a worried look. “We should go where it’s warm,” Tristen said, and on their walk back to the center of camp observed Anwyll pressing a hand to his heart, where no few soldiers wore their Quinalt amulets, or Teranthine ones, beneath their coats, and so Anwyll had had, on a gold chain.

But worried or not, Anwyll ceased the small cough that had troubled him on their walk to the bridge, and there were no more sneezes.

Anwyll’s tent was a spare, snug, and modest affair, with a forechamber large enough for a small chart table and field chairs, such as assembled out of pegs and parts. Twilight was deep, and the lighting of lanterns made a fair contribution to the pungent air, the smoke, and the warmth in the place… a smell that conjured other tents, and the battle at the end of summer… not, curiously, an unpleasant stench, that of oil and leather and horses, and the nearby river, only one that carried the implication of weapons advanced, battles possible, the enemy opposed.

Ale added its own aroma, ale provided from Anwyll’s own store; and at that table and in Cevulirn’s company, Tristen provided the news he had, the confirmation of Drusenan as Lord Bryn.

To the appointment of a lord of Bryn, Anwyll said nothing, nor likely knew whether Drusenan was good or otherwise; but to the mention of fugitives at Modeyneth, he frowned, doubtless not pleased to have Elwynim between him and his capital; and chagrined, it was likely, to have marched his force of elite Guard past a band of Elwynim without knowing they were there.

It was a fault. Tristen neglected, however, to mention it.

“I’ve moved these folk over to Althalen, across the hills,” Tristen said, “to have them safe within walls and not let them gather in numbers on this road.”

“To Althalen,” Anwyll echoed, in mild dismay. “Women and young children. But with the siege of Ilefínian there may be more seeking to cross.”

“And what shall we do with them?”

“Let any cross who will cross,” Tristen said, “if they swear to Her Grace.”

“Armed troops as well?”

“If they’ve Tasmôrden at their backs,” Cevulirn said dryly, “they’ll be in a considerable hurry, and reluctant to discuss. And very difficult it will be to sort out Tasmôrden’s men from the rest.”

“If that should happen,” Tristen said, “by no means receive armed men into your camp. Have them draw off to the east on the shore, and not up the hill, under any circumstance: occupy that, and be sure. If they obey orders, they may camp and not stir out of that camp. And should it happen, advise me of it as quickly as you can. You can change horses at Modeyneth: Drusenan would provide you -what you need.”

Anwyll looked much more content with that instruction, yet a little anxious all the same. “I understand so, Your Grace. And welcome news.” Over all, Anwyll looked more content than he had been in coming here, and seemed particularly friendly toward Cevulirn’s presence, as if, Tristen thought, Anwyll had not quite trusted his orders; but now seeing the duke of Ivanor, had more confidence in what he was bidden do.

That was very .well: whatever comforted Anwyll could only make him a surer captain in this post; and until late hours and by lanternlight, with the snow sifting down from the heavens, they sat in Anwyll’s tent and talked of Bryn’s wall and of extending the river-watch all along the border.

“In both cases,” Cevulirn said, “no prevention to any small force bent on mischief, and going through the hills, but no great force can cross.”

Such forces needed heavy transport, and therefore needed roads, and well-maintained ones, with gravel and rock to fill the soft places. And that, too, Tristen knew as he knew that it was not the kind of warfare he and Cevulirn would use, if there were not Cefwyn’s express order in the way.

“The men of Nithen district in Elwynor were forced to join Tasmôrden’s army,” Tristen said, “and so may others be with him by no choice of their own. Such men may well find occasion to slip across by ones and twos. Question carefully any Elwynim you find, man or woman, and treat them kindly. But be wary. Limit what they can see here. If you get the chance, learn where Cuthan has gone, whether he joined Tasmôrden, and doing what; and what the situation is in Ilefínian, and what kind of force Tasmôrden has. All that manner of thing.”

And after their small gathering dispersed to their beds, “Captain,” Tristen lingered to say.

“Your Grace.” Anwyll’s shoulders were at once drawn up, wariness as quick as an indrawn breath.

“The highroad passes by Henas’amef on its way to Guelessar,” Tristen said. “Don’t send Idrys dispatches by the riverside. There’s no gain in speed and a great risk to the couriers.”

“I assure Your Grace… there is no disloyalty…”

“I know there is not, sir, and I regard Idrys as a friend. He’s an honest man, as I know you are, and I know you are his man. Send to him what you will, with my goodwill. I ask only your courier gather messages from me as well, so we need not have two men risking life and limb on the roads in bad weather.”

Anwyll showed himself overwhelmed, and if manners had allowed it would surely have sat down. “Your Grace, I have never reported anything against you.”

“Yet have reported to Idrys.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“I know you have your own orders. The Dragon Guard is mine only for the season. You should know Uwen has sent home certain of the Guelen Guard, men who wished to be released. I’ve had him take command himself, for the while, until I can muster a force to defend the province.”

“Which officers were dismissed, if Your Grace please to say?”

“The captain and the senior sergeant, both, and certain of the other officers whose names I did not inquire.” He found himself on the edge of his knowledge of what, as duke of Amefel, he could order; and had ordered, by those senses of danger which sometimes ruled his actions. Nothing had Unfolded to him in so doing except the small, steady unfurling of logical steps: take command, hold command, shape it until it fit the hand and the man that must lead it. “I said to the Lord Commander that Uwen Lewen’s-son would be my captain. So he is. And the garrison is what is his to command, since king Cefwyn set me over it.”

“The Lord Commander so advised me,” Anwyll said, with a resolute look. “And I am to command the Dragons, over which I am instructed Your Grace has no authority.”

That was Idrys’ caution, which far from offending, had a warm and familiar feeling. He smiled, hearing it.

“Fair,” he said.~“Yet you came here.”

“I’m instructed to obey reasonable orders, in the king’s interest.”

“And will you name officers for the Guelens? Uwen gave me a list. He says he can’t appoint new officers, but you can. Who do you think is the best man?”

“Wynned.”

“Will return when his mother mends, which I wish she does soon. He seems a good man.”

“A wall in Bryn’s lands and a guard captain dismissed. Your Grace, I had as lief not become adviser to this. And I will send to the Lord Commander, I advise you so.”

“Idrys wishes me to do what keeps the king safe… have this province strong and ready, and not to admit a flood of Tasmôrden’s men or to have Her Grace’s men slaughtered against the river.” It was very clear to him, clearer than all the debates they had had in councils before this, now that he had seen this place by the river, and that identical, snowy shore. “Did you approve the Guelens’ officers, the things they did?”

“No, Your Grace, I didn’t, nor do. If they were my command, they’d be set down.”

He became aware, though how he was not himself sure, that the captain thought himself superior to the Guelen officers, and well he might: it was the truth. But Anwyll was wellborn, and Uwen was always daunted and quiet when Anwyll was about, falling back on his claim he was a common man.

And that was also behind his decision to send Anwyll to the river, that there was a certain reluctance in the man to deal with Amefin, Teranthines, Bryaltines, common sergeants, or peasants. It seemed a fault in him, one hard to lay hands on or to catch with the eye.

As now, Anwyll was sure he would have dealt differently with the Guelens, yet would likely defend them against any charge laid against them in the town.

He gazed at Anwyll, and Anwyll seemed entirely disquieted.

“What they’ve done was wicked,” Tristen said. “I don’t quite know all that the Quinalt means by wicked, but to kill prisoners was wicked. The men they led aren’t bad soldiers, Uwen says so, and he should know, having been one.”

Again that small hesitation, as if what Uwen said and Uwen thought was not, perhaps, what Anwyll thought.

“Wynedd is a good man,” Anwyll said. “I have no trouble naming him. And Ennyn to hold as his second. I’ll write out orders and place them in your hands.”

Anwyll continued to be troubled, and wished he were not in Amefel. Tristen took that thought to his tent afterward.

“I’ve no doubt Anwyll will write to Idrys tonight,” Tristen said when he joined Cevulirn in the soldiers’ tent they had claimed for the night, all their guard sleeping the night in the mess tent which, against a shed now devoted to equipment, had a solid wall for a windbreak.

Cevulirn occupied his half of the tent, sitting on his pallet, their only light from the general fire outside.

“Should he not?” Cevulirn said.

“He should. But I mean so urgently he’ll likely slip a rider out before morning, and I only hope he sends him by the Modeyneth road. He doesn’t trust me, and I wish I could mend that. He doesn’t quite trust Uwen, either, or doesn’t think he should command the garrison, and to that I don’t agree.”

“You should have no illusions, Amefel: he is Guelen, wellborn, and Quinalt, and sees much that troubles him.”

“He’s Idrys’ man, and I do trust Idrys.”

That drew a silent, rare laughter from the gray lord of the Ivanim. “As I think Idrys trusts you, but beware of that trust of his.”

“Why do you say so?”

Cevulirn, looking at him in the almost-dark and leaping light of the fire outside, was all shadows and surmise. “Because, lord of Amefel, Idrys trusts you on grounds of your honesty and your friendship for His Majesty, and if he ever doubts the friendship, or the honesty, or the gift Mauryl Kingsbane gave you, that trust will go with it. And you will never know at what moment. That’s the difficulty of trusting loyal men.”

“Why do you call him that?”

“Mauryl? Or Idrys?”

“Kingsbane. Kingmaker, in the Red Chronicle.”

“Bane to Elfwyn, at very least. Kingmaker, Kingbreaker. Words.”

“Wizards’ words mean things.”

“That they do,” said Cevulirn. “And so I say again, Idrys is aware what they called Mauryl Gestaurien, and he thinks on it daily, I do assure you, Amefel.”

“I shall never betray Cefwyn.”

“You,” Cevulirn said, “are Mauryl Kingmaker’s Shaping. And you are Lord Sihhë of the grateful Amefin. With the best will in the world toward Cefwyn, and all love, do you deny either?”

Perhaps it was a chill draft that wafted through the tent, but it was like Mauryl’s questions. They sat in shadows, and shadows flowed all about them. He trembled when Cevulirn said that; and the trembling would not let him, for a long, long moment, utter any objection.

“I know your heart and your intent,” Cevulirn said relentlessly, “and with the best will to His Majesty in the world, I will answer your summons this Wintertide, and bring the lords of the south with me. That, too, will trouble the good captain, beyond any news the two of us have brought him. But I don’t trouble my sleep over the fact. Anwyll for all his good traits is a Guelenman to the least hair on his head. So I am Ivanim, and southron, and have blood of the Sihhë in my veins. And good Guelen will I never be, lord of Amefel, but a strong friend of His Majesty and friend to you, yes, I shall be. For that matter, Idrys himself is southron, Anwyll’s Guelen loyalty notwithstanding; a man, a Man, and not of the old blood, nor will he trust me or thee entirely, but trust him, I say, and write him often and keep him apprised of what you do. Above all His Majesty must not lose faith in the south, and just the same as that, neither must Idrys. There. Do I go too far?”

“No. No, sir, you do not.”

He understood, both that he was right about Cevulirn, and that he was mapping a dangerous path through Guelen resentments. The northern barons wanted nothing more than to find a cause against him. They would not like the river camps, would far less like his breaching of the king’s law to build the wall near Modeyneth.

Bring your men, he wished to say to Cevulirn, tonight, the two of them alone to hear, and plan. Bring me the army, and we’ll cross the river and bring aid to Ilefínian.

But the words would not come. When it came to defying Cefwyn’s direct order, he had a sudden vision of blood, of fire, and if he were not anchored by Cevulirn’s still-waking presence and Cevulirn’s next, unanswered question, he might have gone wandering to learn what he was almost certain of just now, a desperate, a sinking feeling.

“What’s wrong?” Cevulirn.

“The gates,” Tristen said, for he saw tall gates and fire and figures moving in the light.

“What gates?” Cevulirn asked, for there were none here.

Tristen drew a sharp breath, seeking the place where he was instead of the riot of fire and the clash of arms. “The gates have come open. At this very moment.”

“Where?” Cevulirn asked. “Whose gates?”

“Ilefínian has fallen.”

Cevulirn heard him in utter silence.

“We are too late to prevent it,” Tristen said. “I don’t know how I should know, or how I do know, but I think someone has opened the gates.” He thought, more, that a breath of wizardry had pressed the situation, working quietly and for the merest instant flaring forth. He thought it the more strongly when he had formed the thought, and then flung a defense up in the gray space, strongly, strongly, nothing subtle.

Then the smothering feeling lifted.

“Now the birds will come,” he said, thinking on Auld Syes. “That was what she foretold. We should send to Cefwyn ourselves. Tonight.”

No question it must be one of Anwyll’s men, to hope to get to Idrys.

“Your lordships?” Anwyll asked when they called on him, and he came, roused from bed and with a cloak clutched about him in the dim forechamber of his tent.

“Ilefínian has fallen,” Tristen said, with Cevulirn at his back, and both of them determined.

“Did Your Grace receive a courier?” was Anwyll’s reasonable question.

“No,” Tristen said, “but I’m sure it’s so. Deck the bridge.”

“Your Grace—” Clearly Anwyll had had his wits shaken, and smoothed hair out of his eyes, trying to compose arguments. “You mean to let them across?”

“The ones to come first will be Her Grace’s forces.”

“His Grace thinks Tasmôrden’s men are in the town,” Cevulirn said, “and if that’s so, devil a time holding them from the ale stores.”

“Aye, my lord, I understand, but no messenger, as you say…”

“Disarm any soldiery,” Tristen said, “and send them under escort to Modeyneth. He’ll escort them to refuge. I need a rider to go to Guelemara, to His Majesty, to tell him.”

“Word from the watchers on the river northward may get there first, Your Grace.”

“And if something befalls the messengers, no word at all. There must be a messenger.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“For seven days leave the decking in place on the bridge. Then take it down again.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Anwyll had the look of a man utterly confounded. “And what if the Elwynim come, the wrong Elwynim, and the bridge is decked?”

“You can hold them, Captain,” was Cevulirn’s short answer. “There’s more than enough force here.”

“Your Grace,” Anwyll answered, passion rising. “We did not plan to stand with the bridge open! We need archers!”

“We’ll have them here,” Tristen said, “from Bryn.”

“Amefin, Your Grace.”

“This is Amefel,” Cevulirn said. “Amefin are in good supply here.”

“Your Grace.” Whatever Anwyll had been about to say he thought better of, and collected himself. “I’ll have you a rider immediately, Your Grace.”

Tristen penned a letter in haste and gave it to Anwyll’s messenger. Anwyll added another dispatch, and the rider left. There Was little to do then but return to beds and rest what of the night remained, he and Cevulirn, in quiet converse for the better part of two hours into the dark, coming to no conclusion but that they must set a force here sufficient to hold, and that archers and a muster of Bryn to the wall-building and the defense of the bridge was inevitable.

And if Elwynim arrived who had a disposition to fight their war on Amefin soil, there was a hard choice, separating the two sides and being sure, as Cevulirn said, that the ones they might let abide in Amefel accepted the authority in Henas’amef.

“I’d hoped still a small force might have reached through and broken the siege,” Tristen said in the shadowed dark, all the troubling visions roiling and leaping in the firelight that came through the flap. “But that won’t happen now. Now it’s Cefwyn’s war, the sort he wanted.”

“I’ll post my guard here,” Cevulirn said. “It’s the only reasonable choice. A handful, but the best. They can use the bows.”

“I thank you,” Tristen said into the dark, having no idea else where he could lay hands on more troops this side of Assurnbrook, besides the troubled Guelens. And for a moment the small glow that was Cevulirn in the gray space was a greater one, and the bond of wizard-craft touched one and two out in the camp, smaller lights, but true.

Then, quietly, secret in the deep of night, Tristen set himself to wish such fugitives well and guide them to the river.

And he began to wish snow about Ilefínian, thick, blanketing snow, not so far as the river, where fugitives might strive to cross, but all about the sack of the town, a white blanket to cover the ugliness of death and fire and wounds.

A pure and pristine white, to cool angers, drive men indoors, and give Tasmôrden an enemy that would not yield to the sword.

He did so, and it seemed he was not quite alone in his effort, that in utter silence something in Cevulirn answered, and something in Henas’amef reached out to him, and something in the tower there waked and listened.

Ilefínian is fallen, was the burden of the night. And on the road, two riders, Anwyll’s, and the one Anwyll had sent for them, on to Modeyneth, to Henas’amef, and to Guelessar.

Chapter 4

In the morning was time enough to discuss explicit orders with Captain Anwyll, who had heard the news in the middle of the night with doubt and anger.

But Anwyll had not failed his instructions, and had ordered the bridge decking restored at first light. His men, the elite Dragon Guard, accustomed to clean quarters and the finest fare, swore and struggled and pressed into service the oxen that should this very day have been moving the long-purloined carts back to Guelessar. The drivers were angry, and protested, and were pressed into service, handling the oxen, so Anwyll reported. Where there was not snow and ice, there was mud.

The drivers would be angrier yet to hear they needed remain to take the decking off in another sevenday, Tristen was well sure. They would need the oxen for that, and the carts would not move.

That the Ivanim guard, who were fair shots with a bow, would also remain until the bridge was closed and undecked again, however, improved Anwyll’s mood marvelously.

And that Cevulirn’s lieutenant would remain to lead those men heartened Anwyll even more so, for by that establishment of another senior officer, not all the burden of decision and judgment was on him. Cevulirn’s lieutenant was veteran of numerous independent actions, as Anwyll was not; he was brisk, decisive, and confident, as Anwyll was not; and he was capable of distinguishing one band of Elwynim from another, as Anwyll was not, which made Tristen easier in his mind.

Since the Ivanim lieutenant had set to work, in fact, there was already a different sense of order, men and horses rapidly establishing a more permanent camp with no resources to begin with and abundant resource within an hour, and the Ivanim seemingly everywhere at once, considering winter stabling and timbers they might use for the purpose, if the weather worsened over their week. They accomplished wonders of organization before the morning fires had produced water hot enough for porridge, and by then Anwyll was in far better humor.

So with farewells to Cevulirn’s men, and setting out by a good hour with only Tristen’s small Guelenish guard force and bodyguard around them, they put the river at their backs in short order.

They kept the horses not to a courier’s pace, for their armor and arms and heavy saddles were too much weight on the horses for that kind of riding. But all the same they pressed hard, and reached the ruined wall near Modeyneth at midafternoon, where the area around the old wall and towers already showed signs of clearing, timbers cut, fallen stone swept clean of snow.

The new earl himself was overseeing bands of workers in the brushy woods that had grown up about the old stones.

“My lords!” it was, when Drusenan saw them; and then a more sober reckoning when he saw how they came, without their guards.

“Grave news,” Cevulirn said, and reported what they knew, regarding Elwynor and Ilefínian. “Captain Anwyll of the Dragon Guard will deliver any fugitives to you, and he may ask you to raise a local muster,” Tristen said. He was keenly aware how great a burden he had put on a new man, one time experienced in battle, yes, and a dreadful battle, but not having directed anything more than a village levy on the march. “I’ll ask Lord Drumman to move to your assistance, with carts and oxen, as soon as I reach Henas’amef. I need all the oxen I have at the river. Above all, be very certain whoever you set at Althalen bears no weapons. Collect them if you find them. I’ll have none of the war there brought here.”

“My lord,” Drusenan said in great earnest. “All that you wish, I’ll do. Let me get my horse, and I’ll ride with you to the village.”

“No stopping tonight,” Tristen said, but the reason of their overwhelming haste, that would send Cevulirn riding hard for the south, he did not confess even to this well-disposed and honest man. Rumors enough were likely to fly and would fly, no few of them to the Elwynim, and whence next, there was no limit of possibilities.

All the same Lord Drusenan rode with them as far as Modeyneth and some beyond, after a welcome cup of mulled wine and a breath for the horses.

“I’ve already sent out word to the villages,” Lord Drusenan reported to them, “and told them the state of affairs in Bryn, and our charge from Your Grace, as I’m sure they’ll come to help.”

“You have Bryn’s town resources to draw from,” Tristen said, “and no few men there, with its treasury: I didn’t let it go. I’ll send what I can with Lord Drumman. And horses, which Anwyll may need, if you’ll send them on in good order.”

Another man, Tristen thought, might have sped straight for the town and the court and bought himself fine clothes, but Lord Drusenan had not even delayed for a ceremony, owning his modest swearing as binding on him as any in the great hall. He had gone to the wall to clear brush and snow from about the fallen stones and plied an axe until his hands were blistered. His lady, Ynesyne, had set up great kettles in the center of the village, expecting, she said, a hundred men from surrounding villages to come to the work. She had made provision for them to lodge in the stable and in the hall and wherever the village houses could find a little room.

Besides that, the village wives were packing the village’s sole horse cart with supply for the fugitives in the ruins, while two of the local men had gone ahead with axes, so Drusenan had reported, to prepare shelters and firewood, and added, as everyone did, if only the weather held good.

It should, it must, it would, unless some wizard opposed him; and he might meet that challenge and hold it, too.

“I wish the snow will fall north of us,” Tristen said, with great insistence in his heart, for all the while he and Cevulirn had ridden since dawn, he had held that determination, for whatever, force it had, and now he was sure it would.

He wished health and good fortune on the village; and also on Syes’ sparrows, traveling by now afoot to the ruins at Althalen, where other men of the village would guide them.

“And excuse Anwyll,” he said. “He’s a good man. He has a better heart than one might think. No one of Meiden would have survived at Henas’amef, if not for him coming to advise me what Parsynan was up to. Meiden owes him their lives.”

“I take your advisement, my lord, and will remember.”

But the new lord of Bryn, understanding their haste to reach Henas’amef by dark, few as they were, had no inclination to delay in debate, only offered himself and two of his young men to add to the guard they had.

“You’ve enough to do,” Tristen said, as they were getting to horse, “and I fear nothing from bandits. See to the wall, that’s what I most wish.”

“See the young men exercised in arms as well as building,” Cevulirn advised Drusenan, too. “If there’s any place Elwynor might attack early and hard, it’s this road, and that bridge, with the wall building. Tasmôrden won’t like the look of that at all, and won’t like the rumors out of the south of a strong rule here.”

Amefel, which had used to be the softest approach to Ylesuin, was shored up with stone and soon to be edged with steel and muscled with horses and Ivanim cavalry. And that, Tristen thought, served Cefwyn better than carts and a company of the Dragons.

They made speed homeward bound after Modeyneth, camped but briefly and late, and that more for the sake of the horses that carried them, were on their way again at the first light of a clear, bright dawn, and laid their specific plans on the way, for the guard they had closest to them were trusted men. Cevulirn would write to the other lords, and surmised what force and support they might look for from each… Midwinter Day was the day they set for the lords and their escorts to gather at Henas’amef, a festive day, a time when friends gathered and saw in the new year—could the Quinalt fault a gathering of friends, be they lords with numerous men in their escort? The lords who had fought in Amefel this summer past would gather to give thanks, to share the feast, no less than peasants did around their year-fires, and noble families across the land.

That they might lay their plans then, that, their enemies would know.

But their coming depended on the will of the lords… and on what the weather might hold.

And the latter, Tristen thought, might lie within his hands. But while he might wish the snow away from them, or a moderation in the weather, he was far from certain he could manage something on the scale of hastening a season.

Yet wish he did. They had a great deal to accomplish, and instead of a long time to Midwinter, they found the days until Midwinter a very short time for them to bring together all they wished… for what they wished and planned was to have a force capable of striking through to Ilefínian and threatening the rebels’ gains.

If they could do no more than embarrass Tasmôrden and make him look the fool, that would raise hopes of defying him, and raise men in support of Ninévrisë’s claim… and that would also support Cefwyn’s heavy cavalry and strong force coming from the east… for Cefwyn’s reliance on heavy horse with the roads uncertain as they were alarmed him. Every sense he had of warfare, every sense he gained from the maps said that there was a reason Selwyn Marhanen had not pressed into Elwynor from the east, where roads were not up to Guelen standards, where brush was thick along the roads… he had never been there, but he was sure that was the nature of the land, as sure as if he had seen it, and anything he could do to the south to distract Tasmôrden onto two fronts eased his fears for Cefwyn.

“So the king and the north will have the victory and Murandys may look a valiant soldier,” Cevulirn said in a tone of derision. “Let him, only so we have free rein here, and can raise an army out of the stones of Elwynor.”

“If only Umanon will join us,” Tristen said, for Umanon was the chanciest of their former allies, a heavy horse contingent, in itself, but a valuable one, with their light horse to probe the way. More, Pelumer of Lanfarnesse was not certain, especially if Umanon should hold back. Pelumer, Cefwyn had said, managed to be late to every fight, and they feared he would manage to be late to this one.

“But Sovrag will come,” Tristen said. “I do rely on him.”

“The man was a river pirate,” Cevulirn said, “and the Marhanens ennobled him and granted him the district he holds because that rock of a fortress of his was too much trouble to take. And they needed his boats. As we do.”

“Yet he’s an honest man.”

“An honest thief, nowadays. A reformed thief. Which turned the Olmernmen,” Cevulirn added, “from brigandage against my lands and Umanon’s toward occasional brigandage in the southern kingdoms, a great improvement for us, if it brings us no angry retribution. That in itself was a wonder. More than that, they’ve even planted small fields. That we never thought to see. I confess I like the man better now than two years ago. And he’s learned things from being in Amefel. He’s seen how farmerfolk live fairly well on the land. And he’s learned how to sit a horse, if it’s old and docile.”

“What do you say of Pelumer?” Tristen asked, intrigued by Cevulirn’s reckoning of the brigand lord, whom he did understand. Pelumer, however, blew both hot and cold, to his observation.

“Hard to catch,” Cevulirn said of Pelumer. “Both the rangers of Lanfarnesse and their lord. Apt to take the cautious view, apt not to risk his men. Late to every battle. Yet no coward.”

Pelumer’s light-armed forces were better suited to moving in small bands among the trees, skills of little use in a pitched battle, as Cefwyn had tried to use them. In some measure he did not blame Pelumer for his reluctance to throw them onto the field: for all Cefwyn’s virtues of courage, he had a hardheadedness about the way to win a battle, which was a great deal of force moving irresistibly forward. Pelumer did not like the notion… nor, he found, did he, and he feared for Cefwyn, locking in that reliance on the Guelen forces.

Of Umanon of Imor Lenúalim, canny and Guelen and Quinalt, unlike all the rest of the southrons, he had the most doubt. He was the most like Cefwyn in some regards, but independent and interested primarily in his own province. “And Umanon?” he asked. “Will he agree with us, or with Ryssand?”

“He detests Corswyndam. And since Lewenbrook, he despises Sulriggan.” This was the lord of Ryssand, and the lord of Llymaryn, two of the principal forces in the north. “He’s capable of surprises. And he’s more a southerner where his alliances and his purse are concerned. Nor is he that much enamored of the northern orthodoxy.”

“The Quinaltines?”

“The doctrinists among the Quinaltines. A handful of troublesome priests, clustered around the north-lands, some in Murandys, strict readers of the book and strict in interpretation… neither here nor there for you or me, here in the south. But it’s a reason Umanon doesn’t stand with Ryssand and Murandys. He detests the priests that espouse it, since the orthodoxy, mark you, faults Umanon’s birth.”

“How might they do that?”

“Oh, that Umanon’s mother and her folk are Teranthines, and stiff in their faith as Umanon is in his. He won’t condemn his mother and his aunt and her house, nor his cousins, who are wealthy men and the owners of a great deal of the grainfields that are Imor’s wealth: he trades grain for northern cattle and the cattle for southern gold, to the seafarers, down the Lenúalim. His dukedom may be Guelen and Quinalt as you please, but the Teranthines are best at dealing with foreign folk and best at trade. They fear nothing, accept the most outrageous of foreign ways.”

“And wizards? They accept them.”

“Look at Emuin.”

“Are there wizards in the wild lands south?” He had never read so.

“Assuredly. Perhaps even fugitive remnants of the Sihhë. We Ivanim trade along the border in silk and horses, with the Chomaggari, and farther still. And a modicum of wizardry has never troubled us.”

“You yourself have some gift,” Tristen observed with deliberate bluntness, and Cevulirn regarded him with a sidelong glance. “You use it. You used it during the business at Modeyneth. I think you know you have it.”

“Our house is admittedly fey,” said Cevulirn, “and I confess it, to one I think will never betray that confidence. We aren’t wizards. But the gift for it is there.”

“Between the two of us,” Tristen said, “we might have no need of signal fires. I think you would hear me even in Toj Embrel.”

Cevulirn regarded him a long few moments in silence, and the gray space seethed with Cevulirn’s strong forbidding.

“I will not,” Cevulirn said, “not unless at great need. I have trusted you, Amefel, as never I have trusted, outside Ivanor. And so if you need me, call by any means you can.”

“I think that I did call you,” Tristen said after a moment of thought on that point, “though not by intent and not by name. I needed an adviser, and here you are. And you’ll come back, that I believe, too.” It was in his mind that even his own wish might not be all the reason for Cevulirn’s coming to him, for there were many wizards, Emuin had said, wizards living and dead, their threads crossed and woven, and hard to say which juncture mattered most to the fabric.

Wizardous elements came together in his vicinity, gathered by common purpose, common loyalties, common necessity… Emuin in his tower, he and Cevulirn; Crissand and Paisi; Ninévrisë in Guelemara and Uleman in his grave at Althalen.

Not discounting Mauryl… or Hasufin, though both were dispelled.

We are all here, Tristen thought to himself.

And all through the journey the sky stayed brilliant blue and the land gleaming white, except to the north, where clouds gathered dark and troubled, and pregnant with winter.

The sun was low when their reduced band drew in sight of Henas’amef, and it was a welcome sight, with lights beginning to show, peaceful and familiar with its skirt of snowy fields. A curiously warm feeling, Tristen thought, and how many faces it had, in summer, in winter, by day and by twilight.

Most of all he felt a warm expectation when he saw the Zeide’s tower and knew that a friend lived there, and other friends waited for him and that his own bed was in that upper floor, and that Uwen would welcome him, and Tassand, and all the ones who cared for him. They would do thus, and thus, he imagined, weary of body but happy in the anticipation. All the comforts of his household would fold him in and care for him, knowing him as he knew them. Crissand might be back, might well be back, from his riding out. They would talk, sitting comfortably by the fire.

This was homecoming, he said to himself, a homecoming such as ordinary Men felt, a touch of things remembered and familiar after days of difficulty and strange faces and cold fingers and toes, of chancy food and watching sharply the movements of men he did not know.

They rode through the streets to the easy greetings of craftsmen, with the tolling of the bell at the gate to advise all the town and the height of the hill that the lord of Amefel had come back.

They had come back with far fewer Ivanim than before, it might be, but home safe and sound, all the same, and likely to the gossip and interest of every townsmen that beheld them and the banners.

Where are the Ivanim? they might ask among themselves, and, Was there fighting? But they would see no signs of battle about them, and they would ask until the answer flowed downhill from those in a position to know.

Best of all was Uwen waiting in the stable-court when they had come in under the portcullis of the West Gate… to do no more than change horses in Cevulirn’s case, as Cevulirn had purposed to ride on even tonight. Master Haman would provide the lord of the Ivanim with horses, and Cevulirn would take a small, reliable escort of the best of the Guelen Guard as far as his hall in the south, at Toj Embrel.

So Tristen ordered.

“He’s left his own men at the river with Anwyll,” he added, speaking to Uwen on the matter. “He’ll camp on the road, and we can surely provide him all he needs going home.”

“Aye, m’lord,” was Uwen’s response to the request, and he rattled off names and sent a boy smartly after horses. Just as quickly he sent a soldier after the men he wanted for the escort, naming them by name almost in one breath.

So the yard broke into great and cheerful confusion, Haman’s lads bringing out horses and gear, and assisting Lord Cevulirn, who saw to his own pair of grays, and who had precise requests for their feeding and watering, for he would take them on home with him, never parted from those horses.

But Uwen said, to Tristen alone and with a grim face, “M’lord, I ain’t done well, I suspect. His Reverence took off, an’ I couldn’t stop ’im.”

“Left?” Tristen asked in dismay. “His Reverence left Henas’amef? For Guelessar?”

“The hour you had the town at your back,” was Uwen’s answer. “He ain’t no great rider, but I give him one of the men to see to ’im. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Chapter 5

Efanor’s letter had gone out. No answer as yet had had time to come back. There was only, for Cefwyn, the mingled dread of Efanor’s game and the delicious thought of Ryssand’s consternation—since Efanor had written in the same letter that he meant to announce the engagement at some unspecified time, unprecedented breach of mourning for the Lady Artisane, and worse, far worse for the lady’s reputation, if a royal match once announced were for any reason mysteriously broken off. Dared one suspect the lady’s virtue? Artisane had escaped Ninévrisë’s banishment by her immediate flight into mourning, and now dared she cast herself back into the affairs of the court, and expect immunity? Ryssand had a great deal to worry about.

He knew, and Efanor knew, that the betrothal Efanor pretended to accept would be lengthy in arrangement, fragile in character, and consummated in marriage only, only in the successful conclusion of the Elwynim war and in a moment of advantage: Cefwyn was still unconvinced that the house of the Marhanens could or should weave itself into Ryssand’s serpentine coils.

And if the news of a royal betrothal should get abroad, it might somewhat steal the fire from Luriel’s highly visible betrothal and hasty Midwinter marriage… that also would be regrettable if it happened. But if it set the formidable Luriel at Artisane’s throat, so much the better.

That Lord Murandys wished audience with His Majesty in light of all this was no surprise at all, since the spies that lurked thick as icicles on the eaves had surely noticed this uncommon exchange of messages from both sides and might even have gotten wind of the content. Luriel’s uncle Murandys danced uncertainly these days between the hope of his own advantage in Luriel’s sudden amity with the Royal Consort and the king, on the one hand… and the more workaday hope of maintaining an alliance much as it had been with his old ally Ryssand. Ryssand was generally the planner and the schemer, having the keener wit by far… and Prichwarrin, who was not quite that clever, must feel very much on his own these days, very much prey to others’ gossip and vulnerable to the schemes of all those he had offended, a list so long he might not even remember all the possible offenses.

Now to have any exchange in progress between the royal house and Ryssand in which he was not a participant must necessarily make him very, very anxious.

To be refused audience with the king must make him even more so. In fact, Prichwarrin must be fairly frothing in his uninformed isolation.

But Cefwyn was not at all sorry. He stood at the frosty, half-fogged window nearest his desk in a rare moment of tranquillity, a silence in his day, in fact, which his rejection of Prichwarrin’s approach had gained him. He contemplated with somewhat more equanimity the general audience in the offing… there were judicial cases, among others waiting his attention, one appeal for royal clemency, which he was in a mood to extend: he’d spared greater thieves and worse blackguards than some serving-maid who’d stolen a few measures of flour.

Mostly, in this stolen moment of privacy, he watched the pigeons on the adjacent ledge.

Dared he think they were Tristen’s few spies, remaining in Guelessar? Most of the offending birds had gone, miraculously, the very day Tristen left, and the Quinalt steps were sadly pure. He wished the birds back again, with their master, and wished with all the force of a man whose wishes only came true when Tristen willed it… useful talent, that.

No Emuin, no Tristen. His life was far easier without them drawing the lightning down, literally, on the rooftops. But it was far lonelier. He deluded himself that he had time on his hands, even that he could find the time to take to riding again, with Tristen, with Idrys… oh, not to hunt the deer: Tristen would be appalled. No, they would ride out simply to see the winter and to hear what Tristen would say of it, how he would wonder at things Men simply failed to look at, past their childhoods.

But, oh, how precious those things were! To look at the sky, breathe the cold wind, have fingers nipped by chill and skin stung red and heart stirred to life, gods, he had been dead until Tristen arrived and asked him the first vexing question, and posed him the first insoluble puzzle, and marveled at hailstones and mourned over falling leaves. What miracles there were all around, when Tristen was beside him… and damn Ryssand! that he had had no choice.

He had Tristen’s letter. Gods damn Ryssand, gods bless Tristen, he had good news out of Amefel… and Ryssand dared make only small and cautious moves, a man on precarious ground.

Likewise precarious, atop the snowy roofing slates on a pitch the height of four ordinary houses, small, dogged figures had heaved up ladders across from the royal windows and tied scaffoldings aslant the steep, icy slope of the Quinalt roof, attempting to mend the lightning stroke that had assaulted the gods’ home on earth.

Carts moved below, bringing timbers… carts which might well serve getting supply to the troops, except His Holiness owned these few, and guarded them jealously.

Odd, how avariciously he had begun to look at such mundane things. The carts Tristen had still not returned to him might not come back at all if the weather set in hard, and gods knew what Tristen thought he was doing with them.

Not moving Parsynan’s belongings back to Guelessar, that was clear.

But being a resourceful king and understanding that trying to keep Tristen to a predictable, even a sensible course was like chasing water uphill, he had found ways, and with carts such as he could lay hands on, even those of the minor houses of Guelemara and the trades, he had moved men in greater numbers to the river bridges, using his personal guard and the Guelen Guard, men of Guelessar, not yet calling on the provinces for their levies.

He was merely setting the stage, putting necessary elements in place… keeping a watch on the river the while.

The weather had been surprisingly good, clouds dark to the west during the last two days, darkness over Elwynor, and fat gray-bottomed clouds speeding for the second frantic day across the skies of Guelessar, failing to drop snow or even to shade the sun. The whole season had been warmer than usual… and late as it was, and despite a few evening and morning snowfalls, winter had not set in hard this side of the river. He, who had learned to count wizards among the possible causes, looked at the situation in the west and wondered how much of the good weather was natural.

It was natural, however, that unseasonable warmth, otherwise pleasant, produced its own miseries… for blight had entered a set of granaries in Nelefreissan, royal stores he had planned for support of the army. Mice were fat and prosperous, mites afflicted the mews and the poultry yard alike, fleas had become the kennelmaster’s bane and, worst of all, had spread to the barracks, where they were execrated but not exorcised… remedies of burning sulfur and priests’ blessings had done far less for the men’s relief than a wizard might have done, Cefwyn was sure of it, and he perversely hoped that fleas afflicted all the pious, good Quinaltines who had contributed to Tristen’s and Emuin’s exile this winter.

If Emuin were here, there would not be fleas, and he had remarked that to the clerks and officers, failing to add, if Tristen were here, since wizardry in Emuin was faintly respectable, but wizardry in Tristen reminded everyone why Tristen and Emuin were not here this winter.

Meanwhile Annas, scandalized and fearing the spread of the vermin, drove the household harder than their habit, and wanted afflicted premises scrubbed to the walls.

Mixed blessings indeed. No one had seen such a mild winter, wherein stores of wood were far in excess of current need and ice stayed off the small ponds, to farmers’ relief: no need to go out with axes to enable livestock to drink and no need yet to keep cattle close in byres. Autumn had stayed late, and later. There remained the chance, still, of the howling gray blast that would freeze all in a night and obscure the sun for days, but it had not happened yet… leaving them just snow enough to drive the vermin indoors, and the damned fleas with them, such was his own theory… not mentioning the notion of hostile wizardry and ill wishes from across the river, without a wizard left this side of the river.

Damned defenseless, Ryssand’s quarrel had left them, and not alone to the fleas. If there was worse than vermin, if those scudding clouds heralded some wizardous storm in the making, they might well regret the actions that had sent all the wizards south.

All but one. Ninévrisë had the wizard-gift. He had neglected her in his reckoning. Perhaps, he thought with a wry laugh, perhaps he should appeal to his bride to attempt the banishment of mice. Perhaps the court might forgive her her small flaw, for that benefit.

But it was not a matter for jest, the small gift she had, and that he knew she had. More, and far more serious a matter, all the officers who had come back from Lewenbrook knew there was wizardry in the house of Syrillas and that it had not failed in the daughter. But Quinalt roof slates, mice, and fleas and all be damned, he was not about to prompt them to gossip it to the Quinaltine, who doubtless had heard already.

All the veterans, therefore, kept their counsel, even in the taverns seldom admitting there had been manifestations at Lewenbrook and since, oh, nothing of the sort. One would have thought they had fought on some other field, to hear how it was this company or that which had driven back the enemy and cast their ranks in confusion.

Pigeons now battled for narrow space on the ledge, buffeted one another with gray wings. The losers wheeled away and lit in another patch of snow, unruly, disrespectful of each other, now their master was in exile.

So much odd had happened in those days the living witnesses knew not who had been responsible, or even what they had seen. The apparitions of dead men, the strange lights, the darkness by day… memories of that day shifted and changed like oil on water, so that none of them who had been there quite remembered all of it… nor truly wished to. Men pushed and shoved one another for position, but none of them acknowledged the battles of wizards.

He gave a small shiver, finding his hand chilled to ice by the glass. He drew back his fingers, folded them into a fist to warm them, finding his memories not so pleasant after all. For the pigeons, the silly, gray-coated pigeons, he was tempted to send for bread and take them under royal patronage for Tristen’s sake, never mind what the court would say. It would be simple kindness to poor, dumb things.

But gossip… gossip would pick it up, saying the damned birds were messengers, wizardous in behavior, suspecting them of eavesdropping, gods knew. He could not harbor pigeons without the town imagining darkest sorcery.

In fact, as of yesterday and Efanor’s message, he had emerged from the haze of recent matrimony and the confusion of Ryssand’s attempt to prevent it, suddenly to realize he and Ninévrisë were whole, but that very dangerous things had happened around them… to realize, too, that those they relied on, like Idrys, had only been marking time, waiting for them to face the world at large and realize how few their numbers had grown to be.

So they did, now missing the absent faces, the voices, the counsel of those who should have shared their new life. Gaining each other, gaining a union that should make all the world the richer, they had lost what they most treasured, and might never see the court come back to what it had been. The reports he had out of Amefel spoke alarmingly of rebellion crushed and decisive actions taken… all well within Tristen’s ability, if they challenged him.

But that side of him was dire and frightening: it had shown itself at Emwy, and at Lewenbrook, not the gentle mooncalf, his defender of pigeons and his friend who marveled at a sunbeam… but the soldier, the revenant, whose martial skill spoke of another life, one long, long past.

Parsynan was at someone’s ear, up in Ryssand, but he had passed through the midlands to get there. The Quinalt consequently was busy as the kennel fleas, at this lord’s ear and at that one’s, complaining of wizardry and heresy on the borders, of a populace that hailed Tristen their Lord Sihhë and raised forbidden emblems.

Silence it, he had said to the Patriarch yesterday, with no patience whatever. I need Amefel steady and peaceful, and however Tristen obtains it, well and good.

That last he had found himself adding as if he had to justify his order, as if some value for Tristen should make a difference to the Holy Father.

He wished peevishly he had not been so weak as to add that argument, wished that he had his grandfather’s gift for stopping argument short of justifying himself.

If he were his grandfather he would have said, “The king’s friend is the king’s friend and whoever slights him will have me for an enemy. Damn the lot of you anyway.”

Tristen’s message, precious as it was, had stated in amazingly few words the overturn of all he had arranged in Amefel. He had feared Tristen might prove such a sparse letter writer. Master Emuin had his tower back. A lord of ancient lineage had suffered exile.

Tristen had exiled an Amefin earl. The lamb had assaulted the lion.

And let the rest of them, from Henas’amef to Lanfarnesse, beware their sedition and their scheming, these rebel southrons who had never yet been willing to recognize a Marhanen king. With that gray-glass stare and a question or two, Tristen could assail their very souls, snare them, entrap them in a spell of liking that had no cure… he could attest to that, for he missed sorely the man who had done all this to him.

He had sent his own messenger to Tristen, and another to Cevulirn, asking after their health, professing his gratitude… asking after his carts, in Tristen’s case, and hinting at a readiness to march in Cevulirn’s. He had a province of Amefel rescued from rebellion due to Tristen’s quick action; he had the Amefin people cheering his choice and not throwing rocks at his troops, which was also worth gratitude… if it were only a little less fraught with rebel Bryaltine sentiment for vanished kings.

All these things he had said, in letters to his two dearest friends, and realized thus far, muddleheaded with courtship and marriage, he had been very fortunate until this day simply to have had no disasters.

And as for Tristen, Tristen, whom wizard-work had raised or Shaped or whatever wizards minced up for words… there was no safer place to put him. Mauryl Kingmaker had sent them a gift thus double-edged, a soul who might be Barrakkêth incarnate.

And the Elwynim had long prophesied their King To Come, thinking some surviving one of halfling Elfwyn’s sons might creep out of the bushes and byways to proclaim his thread of Sihhë blood and claim the crown of the old High Kings.

It was, after all, safest that he had himself fulfilled all the prophecies he could lay hands on, naming Tristen lord not only of Ynefel, to which he most probably had right, but to Althalen, and to heretic Amefel, where they might proclaim him lord of most anything in relative quiet. The Teranthines could embrace such heresy. He… even… could bear with a neighboring king, even a High King, did Tristen somehow stray into power.

Dared he, however, could he, should he… ever mention such thoughts to a bride he hoped would remain on this side of the river, in his realm, a peaceful, not a reigning, wife? Among all the preparations he had laid, the moving of troops, the marshaling of aid in council, the hammering-out of titles to bestow on Ninévrisë Syrillas, and this cursed business of priests, sodden or sober… dared he even think the thoughts when he had a bride so gifted as Tristen hinted she was, who might pluck his guilty imaginings out of the very air? He was a king. It was his fate, his duty, to make as much as he could favorable to himself, and therefore to his people.

Pigeons flew up of a sudden, battering each other with their wings at a movement, a sound. The door had opened, and a messenger had come in, and two of his ordinary guards, and Ninévrisë, she… white and frightened, carrying her skirts as if she had been running, all this in a trailing attendance of two anxious maids, Cleisynde and Odrinian, both Murandys’ kin. The man in a Guelen Guard’s colors was still mud-flecked from a hard ride, had wiped smears of it across his freckled young face, and looked exhausted and dazed.

“Your Majesty,” the young man had gotten out, before Idrys, too, arrived with his own aide in close attendance, and the young man looked around to see.

Disaster, and he and Ninévrisë alike could guess from what source. This young officer had come from downstairs, from the stable-court, from the road, from hard riding, and he was Lord Maudyn’s man, a messenger from his commander at the river.

“Your Majesty,” the courier said in a breath, “Ilefínian has fallen.”

Cleisynde was first at Ninévrisë’s elbow, of all the women, the cousins from Murandys, who poised their cupped hands under Ninévrisë’s arms, awaiting a fall, an outburst.

There was none. There were not even tears, only the evident pain.

Not an unexpected blow, Cefwyn thought, nor was it; but, black weather over there notwithstanding, Tasmôrden had carried the siege to the end, meaning the death of Ninévrisë’s loyal folk in the capital, her childhood friends, her supporters, her kin, cousins, remote to the least degree, all, all doomed and done in a stroke.

And yet she stood pale and composed, a queen in dignity and in sharp sense of the immediate needs. “When and how?” she asked the messenger.

“My lord had no word yet,” the man said anxiously, certainly knowing who Ninévrisë might be, but still caught, damn him, in a gap of stiff Guelen protocol that turned the messenger to him. “Your Majesty, I took horse as soon as the fires were lit. My Lord Maudyn will send to you with each new report he receives, but at the time I left, we knew nothing but the signal fires.”

It was tormenting news, disaster, and yet nothing of substance to grasp, no word whether the town was afire or whether there was an arranged surrender, or what the fate of the defenders and the nobles there might be.

“Rest for the messenger,” Cefwyn said. He had his standard of what ought to be provided for men and horses that bore the king’s messages, and his pages knew what to do for any such man. “Fetch Annas.”

“Your Majesty,” it was, and: “Yes, Your Majesty.” and all the world near him moved to comply; but nothing in his power could provide his lady better news, and what use then was it, but the ordering of armies that could bring her no better result?

“We knew it would come,” was all he found to say to her, with a stone weighing in the pit of his own stomach.

“We knew it would come,” she agreed, and turned and quietly dismissed her maids on her own authority. “See to the messenger yourselves,” she bade them, “in my name. And tell Dame Margolis.”

In tell Dame Margolis was every order that needed be made in Ninévrisë’s court… as fetch Annas summed up all his staff could do. The news would make the transit to the court at large, the comfort of courtiers and true servants would wrap them about with such sympathy as courtiers and lifelong servants could offer. At least the gossip that spread would have the solid heart of truth with those two in charge of dispersing it.

But the Regent of Elwynor would stand as straight and strong as the king of Ylesuin stood, and not be coddled or kissed on the brow by her husband, even before the Lord Commander.

“Is that all we know?” Cefwyn asked of Idrys as the door shut and by the maids’ departure left them a more warlike, more forceful assembly.

“Unhappily, no more than the man told,” Idrys said, “but more information is already on the road here, I’m well certain we can rely on Lord Maudyn for that. There’s some comfort in what the message didn’t say: no force near the river, no signal of wider war coming on us. The weather’s been hard, by reports. Nothing will move down those roads to the bridges.”

“Thank the gods Amefel isn’t in revolt at the moment,” Cefwyn said. “Well-done of Tristen. Well-done, at least on that frontier.”

There was now urgent need, however, to move troops west, to the river, in greater numbers, and the transport was stalled in Amefel.

And to Amefel, the thought came to him, the fugitives of Ilefínian were very likely to come, unsettling that province and appealing to the softest heart and most generous hand in his kingdom for shelter and help. That, too, was Tristen’s nature, and it was damned dangerous… almost as sure as a rebellion for drawing trouble into the province that was Ylesuin’s most vulnerable and volatile border with Elwynor.

“We’ll have no choice but wait for more news,” Cefwyn said. “But we will move the three reserve units into position at the river.” With a scarcity of carts and drivers, the vast weight of canvas necessary for a winter camp was going to move very much slower than he wished, and therefore men who relied on those tents would not move up to their posts except at the pace of their few carts.

Damn, he thought, and then, on his recent thoughts and his praise of Tristen for steadying the province, gave a little, a very little momentary consideration that where Tristen was, wizardry was, too… far more than in the person of Emuin. Nothing untoward would happen there, that Tristen could prevent.

There followed a very small and more fearful thought that the hole in the Quinalt roof was not coincidence and the withholding of those carts was not coincidence, either. He knew it was never Tristen’s intent to hamper the defense in the north. Tristen might well have gotten wind of the impending events in Elwynor, too; but the timing of it all had the queasy feeling of wizard-work, all of it moving the same direction, a tightening noose of contrary events.

He knew, for all the affairs of Ylesuin, a moment of panic fear, a realization that all the impersonal lines on maps and charts were places, and the people in them were engaged in murdering one another at this very moment in a mad, guideless slide toward events he did not wholly govern and which those maps on his desk yonder no longer adequately predicted.

They were on the slope and sliding toward war, but even who was on the slope with them was difficult to say.

Difficult to say, too, who had pushed, or whether anyone remained safe and secure and master of all that had happened above them. Tristen’s dark master of Marna Wood, this Hasufin Heltain, this ill-omened ghost, as Tristen described him—devil, as the Quinalt insisted—was defeated and dispelled at Lewenbrook, his designs all broken, and he or it was no longer in question. The banner of Ylesuin had carried that field.

But Tristen had fought among them up to a point, and then something had happened which he did not well understand, or even clearly remember to this day. Darkness had shadowed the field, an eclipse of the light, night amid day; and so the sun sometimes was shadowed, and so wizards could predict it to the hour and day.

But had something been in that darkness? It seemed that the heart of the threat had been not the rebel Aseyneddin, but Hasufin Heltain, and when Hasufin retreated and Tristen cast some sort of wizardry against him, then Aseyneddin had fallen and that war had ended, the darkness had lifted, and all the forces of the Elwynim rebel Aseyneddin had proved broken and scattered in the darkness. Light had come back on a ground covered with dead, many of them with no mark at all.

A man who had fought at Lewenbrook had a good many strange things to account for, and memories even of men in charge of the field did not entirely agree, not even for such simple things as how they had turned Aseyneddin’s force or ended up in the part of the field where they had seen the light break through. They could only say that in the dark and the confusion they had driven farther than they thought and won more than they expected.

Yet…

Yet none of it seemed quite stable, as if they had not quite deserved their good fortune and did not understand how they had gotten there.

They had won, had they not? Yet here he stood with a bereaved wife and no less than Idrys saying there was little they could do.

And if someone pushed them over the precipice toward another conflict, with lightning striking the roof and Tristen driven in apparent retreat… still, they had won the last encounter.

Had they not?

And would they not win against whatever lesser wizard Tasmôrden dragged out of the bushes?

Would they not?

Damn the Quinalt, whose fear of wizardry gave him no better advice than to avoid magic… when the whole of the Quinaltine combined could do nothing of the sort Tristen had done on that field, and nothing of the sort Tristen could do again.

And damn the Quinalt twice: they had sent Tristen to Amefel, even if it was his good design, and done only in time to avert the whole province rising up in arms.

Was that not good fortune… save his carts, which the weather would not let them take across the bridges anyway?

So here they were… committed, and before the winter forced the siege to a fruitless end; and before any white miracle of the gods could intervene to save Ninévrisë’s capital. It was not contrary to their unhappy predictions, at least… none of them had held out infallible hope.

He sent Idrys and Annas away with orders. And only when they stood alone did Ninévrisë allow tears to fall, and only a few of them.

“He will not hold it,” was all he could say to her. At least without witnesses he could gather the Regent of Elwynor in his arms and hold her close against his heart.

“I have never wished I had wizardry,” Ninévrisë said, hands clenched on his sleeves. “Until now. Now I wish it, oh, gods, I wish it!”

“Don’t,” he said, frightened, for she knew what she wished for, and the cost of what she wished, and reached after it as a man might grasp after a sword within his reach… very much within his reach; and no swordmaster, no Emuin, no Tristen to restrain her. He touched her face, fingers trembling with what he knew, he, a Man and only a man, and having no such gift himself. He took her fine-boned fist and tried to gain her attention. “Don’t. I know you can. I believe you can. You can go where I can’t follow, and do what I can’t undo, being your father’s daughter. I know. I know what you do have, I’ve never been deceived, and if Emuin were here… gods, if Tristen were here, he’d tell you to be careful what you wish.”

She gazed at him, truly at him, as if she had heard Tristen say it himself, in just those words. Then she grew calmer in his arms. She reached up and laid fingers on his lips, as if asking silence, peace, patience. The tears had spilled and left their traces on her cheeks in the white, snowy light from the window, and all the world seemed to hold a painful breath.

“I love you,” she said. “I’ll love you, forever and always. That says all.”

“It will always say all. And they won’t win, Nevris. They won’t win.”

“But oh, my friends, all my friends… my family… my home and my people…”

“I know.” He set his arms about her, let her rest her head against his shoulder, and she heaved a great, heartbroken sigh with a little shudder after. “Gods save them. We’ll go. We’ll take the town. We’ll have justice.”

If he had gone to Elwynor in pursuit of Tasmôrden at summer’s end, if he had not insisted on dealing with his own court, his father’s court, and all the old men, believing he would have loyalty from men who had hoped he would never be king.

Folly, he could say now: the might of Ylesuin had been readier then than it was now, if he had only taken the south on to a new phase of the war, and damned the opinions of the old men who supported the throne in the north. If even two or three of the midlands barons had come behind him and gathered themselves for war along with the southern lords, they might have crossed the river, carried through to the capital… he had had Tristen with him, for the gods’ sakes.

But what had he done with Tristen’s help? Set it aside. Tried to silence him for fear of his setting northern noses out of joint. Kept him out of view instead of using his help. And not demanded Emuin come down out of his tower and forewarn him. He had delayed for deliberations with men he had thought reliable and necessary and respected their arguments and their long service to his father, telling himself that their opposition to him had ended when he took the crown. Well now he had the consequence of it.

Yet crossing the river thus and relying on Tristen’s help with Althalen’s black banners flying would have offended the north, scandalized the Quinalt, alienated the commons, and that might have led to disaster and weakened Ylesuin, on whose stability all hope of peace rested… there was that truth. There was that.

Yet what might he have made of Ylesuin if he had not stopped at Lewenbrook and not forbidden magic and never come home to Guelemara until he had come as High King and husband of Elwynor?

What might he and Ninévrisë have become with the strength he had had in his hands in those few days? Everything he had done, he had done to get a legal, sanctified, recognized wedding that would secure an unquestioned succession, sworn to by the Quinalt and legally incontestable.

And, doing that, he had given Ninévrisë no way to win him and his aid except to cross every hurdle he set her. What else was she to do, having no army, having nothing but a promised alliance with him on condition of their marriage?

He owed her better, he thought, holding her close and cherished within his arms. Damn Tasmôrden and damn Ryssand and his allies, and damn his own mistaken trust in his own barons, but he owed her far, far better than this.

Chapter 6

The baskets had disappeared from master Emuin’s stairs long since—Tassand’s managing—and Tristen left his guard below as he climbed up and up the spiral stairway on this day after his arrival home.

A door opened above before he could reach it, letting out not daylight this time, but warmth and candle glow, and a rapidly moving boy… who had not expected to see him there, face on a level with his feet. Paisi came to an abrupt halt and tried to make himself very small against the wall of the landing.

“M’lor’,” Paisi whispered, as Tristen climbed up to stand there, far taller than Paisi.

“Paisi,” Tristen said. “I trust master Emuin is in.”

“Oh, that ’e is, m’lor’, an’ ’is servant sent me after wood an’ salt, which I’m doin’, m’lor’, fast as I can.”

“Other servants from the yard will carry the wood up for you, understand. You have only to ask them. The salt you must manage. Cook’s staff will not come up these steps. They complain of ghosts.”

“Yes, m’lor’.” A deep, deep bow, and a wide-eyed, fearful stare. “Yes, m’lor’, an’ I will, m’lor’.”

“Emuin won’t harm you.”

Paisi seemed to have lost all powers of speech. He had only added a good coat to his ragged shirt and worn boots to his bare feet; but he had had a bath, despite his uncombed and undipped look.

“Didn’t I send you to the guard and to Tassand,” Tristen asked on that sharper look in the imperfect light, “and is this the dress they gave you?”

“I been i’ the market, m’lor’, an’ beggin’ Your Grace’s pardon, listenin’ as ye said, so I kep’ the clothes, as they’d point at me if I was in a fine new coat.”

There was a small disturbance of the gray space, a gifted boy trying to become invisible, as, in those clothes, he looked very much the boy he had always been… except a fine new coat.

“Go, do what he asks,” Tristen said, not willing to deny master Emuin’s instructions, whatever they might be, and not willing to plumb the convolutions of Paisi’s reasons this morning. He had far more serious matters to deal with.

Paisi ran past him, and Tristen stepped up into the doorway of a tower room in far better order than last he had seen it.

“Good morning,” Emuin said from the hearthside. Emuin sat on a low stool, stirring a pot and not looking at him, but the faint touch of wit was there, in the gray space, and it was the same as a glance. Tristen took it so.

“So Cevulirn is riding south,” Emuin said, “leaving his guard at the river, and you have made your agreements for Bryn, for the raising of a wall, and for the settling of a band of fugitives at the old ruins.”

“To Cefwyn’s good. Do you say otherwise?”

“Not I,” Emuin said. “No.”

It was always the same reply, whether a refusal or a denial of objection always unclear. Emuin never rose quite as far as agreeing with his choices, and this refusal to contradict him was as halfhearted.

“I have ordered the watch fires ready,” Tristen said, coming to stand over the old wizard. “Which is a great hardship on the men that keep them. Consequently I wish all bad weather north of the river. I could reach Cevulirn otherwise, but it seemed better to use the fires, and to extend them to the view of Lanfarnesse, Olmern, and Imor.”

Emuin nodded.

“Was that wrong?” Tristen asked. “Is it wrong?”

Emuin gave a shrug and never abated his stirring. Whether it was a spell or breakfast was unclear by the pot’s sluggish white bubbling. It smelled like porridge.

“I’m sure I don’t weep for Tasmôrden’s discomfort,” Emuin said. “It’s no concern of mine, and none of my doing.”

He could lose his temper entirely at this resumed silence. Almost. But Mauryl had taught him patience above all things, and he gathered it up in both hands.

“Porridge?” he asked, a tactical change of subject.

“Barley soup.”

“How does the boy do?”

“He’s a scoundrel,” Emuin said, “but deft. He won’t steal from me. As for why you’ve come—you wished His Reverence in Guelessar, as I recall. So to Guelessar he’s gone.”

A shot from the flank. It was not entirely why he had come, but he knew he was in the wrong, and badly mistaken in the way he had dealt with the man. “Uwen couldn’t stop him.”

“Short of your man arresting him or sitting on him, I doubt Uwen could have done anything to prevent him. What a cleric will, that he will, and a duke’s authority through his man or otherwise can’t stop him… short of lopping his head, that is, and that creates such ill will among the clergy.”

“I’ve written to Cefwyn,” he said meekly.

“Good. You should.”

“And to Idrys, more plainly.”

“Regarding?”

“Ilefínian.”

“That…”

“Ninévrisë’s people are dying, sir! Don’t you know that? That’s why I came.”

Emuin looked at him from under his brows. “I say that because it was foredoomed to happen.—So, perhaps, was your settlement at Althalen. Oh, yes… that matter, while we’re at it.”

“You might have advised me.”

“Advised you, advised you… were you ignorant what Althalen means, and what it signifies to have that site of all sites tenanted again?”

He drew a deep breath. No, he could not say he was ignorant of that.

“Were you unaware?”

“No, sir. But there was nowhere else I knew to put them. Here wasn’t safe.”

“In that, you may be right.”

“Am I wrong, sir?”

“Wrong? I think it must have been fated, from the hour Cefwyn, the silly lad, handed you its banner and his friendship. What more could he think?”

“Have I done wrong, sir?ⁿ

“I don’t think right and wrong figure here. If Althalen was foredoomed to fall and foredoomed to rise, damned little he or I could do about it.”

“And I, sir?”

“At least this manner of rebirth does no harm to him.”

From the edge of the water to very, very deep waters indeed, and shattering accusations.

“I am his friend, sir!” Tristen dropped to a bench near the fire, rested his elbows on his knees, and met the old man face-to-face, seeking one level, honest look from him. “Look at me, master Emuin! Have I given anyone any reason to think otherwise? Have I ever given you or Cefwyn any reason to think otherwise of me?”

“This boy you found,” said Emuin, shifting the tide of question again onto a former shore, “this boy who’s provoked His Reverence to disastrous measures and brought us all manner of trouble also happens to inform me of various things. A wisewoman, one of the grandmothers, has mothered young Paisi since he was left as a babe at her door. I’m fairly sure there’s the old blood in him, which doubtless frightened his unfortunate mother into abandonment. That, or she had the Sight herself and saw him tangled with your fate.”

“I wasn’t here yet! Mauryl hadn’t Summoned me.”

“All the same.”

“Why? Why should anyone fear me?”

“Why should anyone fear you? What do you think? And considering the small matter of His Reverence, tell me what you think he’s apt to do.”

“Spread trouble in Guelessar.”

“Is it absolution you want or a better answer?”

“What shall I do about it?”

“Why did you bring Paisi out of gaol? Why was it important to find him?”

Wizards. Like Mauryl, Emuin shifted the ground under his feet and answered questions with questions on an utterly different matter: aim at him, and the shot came back double… and with terrible, dreadful surmises.

He mustered his wits to answer that question, as levelly and patiently and completely as he could: no lies, no evasions with master Emuin… to lead his guide to wrong conclusions served no good at all.

“He was my first guide when I came from Mauryl to Henas’amef. Paisi was. Should I leave him free, sir, counting all you’ve taught me of wizardry, to fall to other influences? Something moved him to bring me to the right place on the right night. As it moved me to settle the fugitives at Althalen.”

“A question, is that? Should you have heeded Paisi in the first place?”

“Do you think Mauryl sent him to guide me? Was it his doing?”

“Think you so?” Emuin asked him.

“Who else might?” The impatience in him scarcely restrained his hands from clenching into fists. He wished to leap up and move, tear himself from this uncomfortable confrontation he had provoked.

But he had not sat learning of wizards for no gain. Listening and trying to answer Emuin’s questions was the best course, the only course that would ever bring him an answer.

And it was so, that Mauryl, lost with Ynefel, had reached far, very far with his spells. At one time it had seemed perfectly clear that Hasufin Heltain was the cause of Emuin’s fear. But Hasufin was gone now, was he not?

And yet Emuin seemed more afraid than before.

“Who indeed else would have sent the boy?” Emuin said. “Since no one but Mauryl knew the why and wherefore.”

“Might Mauryl’s wishes for me,” he asked, “have entered into some other pattern, one of, say, someone else’s making?”

“Troubling thought,” Emuin said faintly, rapping the soup-coated spoon clear on the rim of the pot. “There are so many choices.”

“You.”

“Not to my knowledge. I assure you I had never besought the gods for another student.”

“The enemy… Hasufin.”

“A remote chance,” Emuin said, and plunged the spoon back into the pot. He swung the pot off the fire.

“But you think not.”

“I think not.”

“Paisi himself guided the meeting?”

“Possible, too, remoter still though it be.”

Remote, yes. So he had thought. “Someone should care for the boy,” Tristen said, attempting a diversion of his own, from an area he did not now want to discuss. “And you lacked a boy. You need a good pair of legs, and he needs a Place, or something else may indeed find him. I think I was right in that.”

“A gift, now drawn into our web. What more?”

“A very little of the gift, I think.”

“Has the calamity of his presence been little? His Reverence sped to Guelessar? And now this boy in my care? Doubly dangerous to be poking and prying around a wizard’s pots with gifted fingers. I had trouble enough with the brothers from Anwyfar, and them scared witless. A gift is not to judge by its surface or its apparent depth. By the waters that churn around him, mark me, this boy is dangerous.”

“He may be,” Tristen said, “but that means he’s dangerous to be wandering free, too, and moiling other waters.”

“Perhaps.”

“He needs a Place, does he not? Is he not more dangerous without a Place?”

“And so you lend him this one, gods save me. He’ll go through clothes, he’ll eat like a troop of the Guard, and his feet will grow. I do not cook, mind you! Nothing except my own meals.”

It comforted him, that Emuin did not seem as set against Paisi as he had feared, and within the mundane complaints he heard nothing so grievous as their prior discussion. “All that he needs the Zeide has for the asking. And he can cook for you.” Another shift of direction. “He’s running your errands, so I think, to the market, yours as well as mine.”

“I sent him after turnips yesterday.”

“Turnips. Is there some flaw in Cook’s turnips?”

“You’re such a troublesome young man!”

“I fear I’ve become so,” he said sadly. He envied Paisi, to do no more than run a wizard’s errands, and to learn the ways of bird nests, and all such things as had passed his reach. Another boy belonged to Emuin. He did not. He had become something else, as Cefwyn had passed through Emuin’s hands and become something else. A severance had occurred without his seeing it coming.

But he had learned Emuin’s greater lessons: patience, and examination of himself. And what had he interrupted Emuin saying to him: something about turnips and the marketplace?

“Taking in thieves,” Emuin muttered. “Conversing with exiles…”

“Cevulirn came north to discuss Cefwyn’s affairs with me,” Tristen said sharply, “and something very powerful wished to prevent him. I’m all but sure it wasn’t Auld Syes who raised that storm. Tell me again and tell me true: was it you?”

Emuin’s brows lifted in mild wonder, and Emuin did look at him eye-to-eye, his gaze for the moment as clear as glass. “No, not I. Have you another thought?”

“What do you seek in the market?” Tristen asked in Emuin’s style: divert, feint, and under the guard.

“Much the same as your questions to the boy, thank you. Especially the old women have ears, and the sort of awareness you and I have. They’re a valuable resource, the witches, the wisewomen of Amefel. I’ve used them from time to time. Now you’ve thought of the same resource and asked the right question. Shall I tell you what I know?”

“Yes, sir. If you please.”

“Then look about you: the people have had a rebirth of their faith. So the Bryaltines say. The old symbols appear openly in certain alleys, and people wear charms and set them in their doorways. They hang bells in the wind, so their dimmer ears can hear what we hear in it. All this affronted the good Quinalt father, and scandalized our missing sergeant, I’m sure, gods save his devout soul.” This Emuin said not without sarcasm.

“I suppose I’ve seen it.”

“You know you’ve seen it. You’ve not found it remarkable until I mention it. And in your absence, however brief, the Bryalt father turns out to have gained two nuns of his order, women formerly in the service of the Zeide, who two days ago were prophesying in the street… saying openly that the Sihhë have risen in Henas’amef and in Amefel. And, do you know, they prophesied the rewakening of Althalen?”

Tristen was appalled.

“Oh, and this before you came back to say so, perhaps on the very day you did it. So they have the Sight and have it in good measure. And on that news, the good father quit the town and struck out down the road in mortal offense, behind the captain and the sergeants who also went to Guelemara. Can you imagine the meeting at Clusyn?”

The monastery where travelers stayed.

“So you’re building at Althalen,” Emuin said, “nuns are in the street foretelling the rise of the Sihhë-lords and the return of the King To Come, and gods save us all… they saw what you were doing.”

He heard. The words echoed in the air, off the walls of events past and present. He heard the hammer strokes of men at work on stone, not uncommon in the Zeide these days; but it echoed work elsewhere, on a ruined wall; he heard the whisper of the wind at the eaves, warning of change in the weather: he heard the running footsteps of a boy on an errand, illusion only, for the boy himself, desperate and afraid of help as well as harm, was well out of the vicinity by now, seeking wood and salt, he had said.

“I have not resettled Althalen, not as a name. I settled a handful of fugitives there, a mere handful of desperate folk wanting shelter from the snow. There were walls to use, and it’s remote from the road. Is that wicked of me?”

“And what more do buildings and walls do, young lord, what do they do more than shelter us from the weather?”

Nothing, was the quick answer; but, no, that was not so, in wizard-craft, and in his heart he knew it: buildings had wards.

And those ruins had the strongest in all of Amefel, the protection of the Lord Regent, Ninévrisë’s father, whose tomb was there. He had chosen Althalen precisely because of that, and it had seemed right. Now Emuin chided him on that very matter, and the whole complexion of his decision shifted.

“They are a Place,” he said. “Lines on the earth.”

“So you have given Place to Elwynim at Althalen. And lo! you have subjects there, Lord Sihhë. You have subjects who are not Amefin, not in our king’s gift, not in authority he gave you. And we have nuns telling visions in the streets. Was this wise?”

He was struck cold and silent, asking himself how things could have so turned about.

“I have,” he admitted after a moment, “likewise ordered the wall restored near Modeyneth. What do you say about that?” But he already knew. He had himself rebuilt the ward there, too, consciously, in defense of Amefel, and never thought of its other significance, as a ward the Sihhë had laid. He had thought of the protection the wards afforded the fugitives. He had not thought of the strength inhabitants gave the wards: Althalen was alive again, and of his doing.

“Thank the gods,” said Emuin, “His Reverence left before he heard this news.”

“I sent a message to Cefwyn from Anwyll’s camp. So has Anwyll, already, once we knew Ilefínian had fallen. The messenger was to ride straight through, not even stopping here. I sent another last night, before I slept. The people that escape Tasmôrden will flee into Amefel. It’s all they can do. But I can’t allow the border to be overrun by troops and fugitives, stealing and slaughtering the villagers. Do justice, Cefwyn told me, and I swore I would. Is it justice to stand aside and let war come here, when I could stop it?”

“Justice is a hard word to define. Kings battle over it.”

Diversion and regrouping. The ground had become untenable. “Whose storm was it?”

“ I had no wish to prevent your talking to Cevulirn. I had no forewarning, and I would never quarrel with Auld Syes.—Whose was the lightning stroke that drove you from Guelessar?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “Was it a wizard? It must be a powerful wizard who could do that. Could it be Auld Syes?”

“I doubt it. Amefel is her concern, and her Place.”

“Yet… conspiracy among the earls, the overthrow of Lord Parsynan… all these things were happening when the lightning came down.”

“None of which His Majesty knew when he sent you. Lightning struck the Quinaltine roof, and you found yourself on the road.”

“So it was not chance, not the lightning, and not Cefwyn sending me.”

“It was, and it was not. Do you know so little of wizardry, young lord? No. I forget you need not know a damned thing about wizardry. You need not learn anything. Things Unfold to you. Might leaps to your fingertips and all nature bends when you stamp your foot.”

Emuin was exaggerating, vastly so, but reminding him how little he had bent himself to Emuin’s art, and how little he knew of it.

“For us mere Men,” Emuin said in a surly tone, “it’s chance and not chance that such things happen. Learn this: wizardry loads the dice, young lord, but they still can roll against the wall. Surely you know that much. And maybe it’s a flaw in you, that you need not study, but find it all at your fingertips: gods know what you can do.”

“I wish to learn, master Emuin. I wish to be taught. I’ve asked nothing more.”

“Oh, you’ve asked far more, young lord. You’ve asked much, much more. But let us walk together down this path of chance and if and maybe. Let us look at the landmarks and learn to be wise. If there had been no lightning stroke and you had not come, and then Amefel had risen… what would have happened?”

“Calamity.”

“So. But then what did happen?”

“Crissand’s father and his men took the fortress. And then I took it.”

“And Crissand Adiran survived, but his father did not. Was this chance, too? The rebels took the fortress. They died. Two events not necessarily benefiting the same power. Crissand escaped the slaughter. A third event. You seized Amefel. A fourth.”

Not necessarily benefiting the same power.

“Lad,” Emuin gazed straight at him. “Lad, are you listening to what we’re saying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What have I told you?”

“That there may be two powers.”

“No. That there may be more than one.”

“Yes, sir,” he said in utter solemnity. “I do hear.”

“You are one of those powers,” Emuin said. “That’s always worth remembering. Don’t act carelessly. Don’t assume the dice have only one face. It’s only by considering all the faces that you can load one of them. That’s wizardry, young lord. That’s why it means learning, difficult, farseeing learning.”

The echoes in the air remained, a brazen, troubling liveliness, as if all events balanced on a point of time and might go careering off in any direction without warning.

“I can swear I didn’t raise the storm or conjure Auld Syes,” Tristen said, grasping at that straw.

“Then reckon at least three with the ability must be involved here,” Emuin said, “and four, young sir, for I didn’t raise them, either.”

“Lady Orien?”

“Think you so, lord of Amefel?”

Emuin changed salutations and none of it was without significance. It was lessons again. It was a signal to him: he was not at this moment young lord.

And he gave Emuin as honest answers as he had given to Mauryl, last spring, in hope ultimately of revelations about himself such as Mauryl had given him.

“Her dragons lean over me as I write. Lady Orien broke the great Lines there, in that room in particular, when she opened it and let in Hasufin. I repaired them as I could. But I never am at ease in that place.”

“Well, well,” Emuin said, “and well reckoned. Now never after this say that I failed to advise you. I have advised you. Now and at last you may have heard what I say, beyond all my expectations. I have warned you, as best I can.”

“And else?” Tristen asked. “Is Orien all your warning?—Or is it Hasufin?”

Emuin’s charts lay scattered across the table, charts of great sweeping lines and writing that teased his eye with recognition, but that was not the fine round hand Men used nowadays. He moved one, in Emuin’s silence, and made no sense of the parchment, the visible sign of studies Emuin pursued and would not divulge.

“Don’t disarrange my charts, pray. Go raise walls against the law. Chastise the fool boy you’ve given me. I leave it to you. Leave me to my ciphering. Gods! Don’t—”

He had picked up a chart, almost, and let it down again.

“Don’t disarrange them. I’ve enough troubles.”

“Does the order matter? What do you cipher, sir? Wherein is it wizards’ business, all these writings? Do you draw Lines also across the sky and ward the stars, too?”

“None of your concern, young lord! Leave my charts, I say, and go find that wretched boy wizard you freed from a just and deserved hanging. He’s probably filched three purses on his way to the kitchens.”

“He’s mine, at least… that he’s in my care. And his listening in the town is for my sake. And if he helps you, claim duty of him; but he won’t cease to be mine, master Emuin, unless you ask for him. Until you give me reasons, I won’t change it.” His converse with Emuin had skipped from question to question, all around the things he most wished to know, and grew cryptic and uneasy. “Why the stars, sir? What can you hope to find? Or to do?”

“Curiosity. A lifelong study. My diversion. All wizards have such charts.”

“Mauryl did. Parchments, papers, everywhere, and all blown about when the tower fell. I find it curious you have the same study.”

“Mauryl lived centuries. The planets were a passing show to him.”

“And to you, sir?”

“Damn, but we’re full of questions. Question, question, question.”

“So Mauryl taught me. So I learn, sir, or try to. I’ve been respectful and said yes, master Emuin. But you said I should study wizardry. You said I should look at all the faces of the dice.” He understood dismissal, however, in Emuin’s distress and reticence: Emuin wished him gone, so he rose and crossed the room and set his hand on the door, with a backward look at the stone, unplastered chamber, at shelves untidy and groaning under their load, and a bed at least supplied with new blankets.

More blankets were under the bed, where Paisi had tucked a pallet, perhaps; it looked to be that, or a repository of Emuin’s discarded clothes.

“I’m glad you’ve shut the windows,” he remarked in leaving, “and I’m glad you’re not alone here.”

“Bryaltine nuns,” Emuin muttered. “The Sihhë star in the marketplace and hung on pillars, and His Reverence to Guelessar. Don’t surprise Cefwyn with these things. And in your writing to Idrys, apart from Cefwyn, make a thorough job of explaining, lad. Make it very thorough. I’ve no doubt His Reverence will.”

Chapter 7

The senior clerk came to the ducal apartment at Tristen’s request, and proudly presented a thick set of papers, figures, great long lists of carefully penned numbers and tallies. Tristen had found a keen interest in his resources since his venture out to the river and back. He had inquired of his clerk what he had at his disposal.

But this was not the answer, at least not in a form that Unfolded to him. And asking the clerk what the sum of the accounts meant he could buy produced only confusion, a business of owed and received and entitled and the seasonal difficulty with contrary winds in distant Casmyndan, southward.

“Ciphering,” Uwen said, when the clerk had gone, and added with a little laugh, “which I don’t know wi’out I count on my fingers, an’ for large sums I wiggle toes. So I ain’t a help there. I’d best take mysel’ to the horses an’ the men and leave ye to your readin’, which ye don’t lack in that stack.”

“It’s coins. It all stands, for coins, does it?”

“Coins, m’lord. Aye, I reckon, in a way, it does that.”

“Crowns and pennies,” Tristen said, and drew up that sheet of common southern paper, one of a score of papers on which long columns marched in martial order. But not of martial things. “Five hundred crowns and seventy pennies of sheep.”

“’At’s some few sheep,” Uwen said. “An’ ’at there’s why Your Grace has clerks.”

“I have no difficulty with the numbers,” Tristen said, “only this business of pennies and pence coming from them.”

“Pennies and ha’pennies and small pence,” Uwen said, in that quiet, astonished mildness that attended such close, odd questions, “an’ being as we’re in Amefel, the king’s pence an’ th’ old pence an’ the farthing an’ ha’farthing, an’ the king’s reckonin‘ an’ the old reckonin’. All in the market at the same time, in Amefel: no small wonder if ye blink at it.”

“Show me,” he said, pushing the papers across the desk, “if you will. You understand.”

“Good gods, I ain’t the one.”

“The clerk hasn’t helped. You show me.”

Nothing had Unfolded, nothing showed any least promise of Unfolding to show him the sense in these papers and accounts, which he had asked for, and he had until the first hour after noon before he should meet with the earls and give his own report.

Uwen obediently came closer, picked up a paper, and looked at it.

“Here’s fine, fair writin’, but the sense of it’s far above me, m’lord.”

“So are farthings and half farthings above me.” Tristen laid his finger on a number on a paper that chanced to be in front of him, that of one fleece. “What’s that to a penny? That one there.”

Uwen craned sideways to look. “That ’un I can show ye.”

“Here.” He swept aside the papers, and found a fair unwritten one. But Uwen, disdaining the pen and the clean sheet, sat down on the other side of the table, emptied out his purse, and showed him how many coppers made a gold crown, and each five coppers a king’s penny, and what was a farthing piece, worth a cup of ale, and why ha’farthings were in the reckoning but left out of the actual payment because there was no such coin ever minted in the history of the world.

Ha’farthings, a petty sum, did not pay the bill when he considered what the cost was to feed and clothe and house the staff, and then to fit out men-at-arms and build the ruined walls.

And Uwen professed his purse out of coins, and not even one fleece was accounted for.

“Get those in the cupboard,” Tristen said, for he knew there were gold ones there, and silver, and Uwen and he made stacks and piles in order, until they accounted for a whole flock at once.

After that he could look at his list of sheep and know how much gold that was, and therefore how many of those sacks that were in the strong room deep, deep in the heart of the Zeide, where the strongest guard was mounted.

“Let us go downstairs,” he said.

“M’lord,” Uwen protested, “we can’t be stackin’ the bags in th’ countin‘ room.”

“I wish to see it,” he said, “now that I understand this much.”

So down they went, the two of them, and the guard that always attended him, all rattling and clumping down to the main hall and down and down the stairs that otherwise led to Emuin’s tower, until they came to the strong room and the guarded door.

To him the strong-room guards, members of the Dragon Guard, deferred, and unlocked and unbarred the place. The escort as well took up station outside, and Tristen and Uwen stood amid stacks and bags of gold, and plate, and cups, and all the service that had graced Lord Heryn’s table, besides the ducal crown and various jeweled bracelets and other such.

“Now, them jewels,” Uwen said, “I hain’t the least idea.”

Tristen said nothing, for the sight of all of it seemed at last to Unfold to him a comprehension of the treasure Lord Heryn had. He had been down here once before, in his first days here. But only now, well lit and laid out as it was, he began to know the extent of it.

“M’lord?”

He drew in a deep breath, more and more troubled by what he saw.

“This is a very great lot of gold,” he said.

“That it is.”

“Men died for this,” he said. “Very many men died for this.”

“An’ damn cold comfort,” Uwen said, thrusting his hands into his belt and letting go a great sigh, “’cept as it buys firewood and all. An’ don’t ask me why gold should be worth so much, ’cept it’s such as a man can carry the worth of a horse in his purse, an’ damn unlikely he could carry the horse.”

He scarcely heard Uwen, except the last, and he gathered up the threads of it belatedly and gave a small, shaken laugh. “That it is. But there are too many horses in this room and not enough in the stable; and too many loaves of bread here and not enough in Meiden’s villages, aren’t there? That’s what you mean.”

“I think it is, m’lord. A box like as we brought from Guelemara, we’d fill it a lot of times in this room, and that box full up with gold is enough for two hundred men and horses for half a year. That’s the ciphering I know.”

“Imor and Olmern sell grain for gold.”

“Both do, and is likely to be jealous of each other, if ye pardon me, m’lord. Imor don’t like the Olmernmen, but the Olmernmen have the boats.”

Amefel could do with both grain and boats in its defense, Tristen thought, and standing in all this wealth of gold, he knew that he beheld a kind of magic in itself, to summon boats, and feed men. Gold became grain, and sheep, and well-fed villages. Parsynan had gathered taxes and put them in this room; so had Heryn, over years of rule, and aethelings before him had done it since the time of Barrakkêth and before. Cefwyn, he knew, had taken some sum of money away, so Cefwyn had said at summer’s end, for the welfare of the province, and because the king’s tax was due, but far more was here than the tax should ever have required, and what was anyone doing with it?

It was far in excess of what needs he even yet understood, in flocks, grain, wagons, food, and horses.

The visit to the strong room was in the morning; the afternoon belonged to the earls, Crissand, Drumman, Azant, Marmaschen, Durell, and the rest, with some who had come in from the country, all gathered downstairs in the little hall, over maps which told their own story… the capital of Elwynor, not far from the river, fallen now, and the loyal subjects of Her Grace prey to the rebels under Tasmôrden: red marked the disasters, red of blood.

“I’ve given Her Grace’s men leave to cross the river,” Tristen said to the earls, seated at the end of the table whereon the maps were spread, heavy books weighting their corners. A stack of books the clerks had found pertinent in the ravaged archive sat beside the maps, overwhelming in the sheer volume of what he did not know. “Captain Anwyll has orders to disarm the armed men when he finds them and assure them they may trust Amefel for protection. So we must provide that protection.” By that the earls might understand he intended them move to a winter muster, but he added quickly, “The Ivanim are providing that guard of archers for the days the bridge is open, and Lord Cevulirn will send more if they find themselves pressed. So may others. He’s advising all the southern provinces of the danger. What we need to do is stand ready to help the troops they may send with supplies and transport. And in some part of which we may be able to rely on boats from Olmern. Lord Cevulirn will request that, too, and Lord Sovrag is our friend.”

“The Olmernmen will want pay, all the same,” said Drumman.

“Let them have Heryn’s gold dinnerplates,” Tristen said, “if they value them. I had far rather boats full of grain and enough men to keep the border.”

There were glum looks, then. He did not quite see why.

“Do you think I’m wrong?” he asked in all honesty.

“Your Grace,” Azant said, “ I will contribute.”

“And I,” Crissand said, a little ahead of a muttered agreement from others, men who days ago had been arguing the poverty of their people.

“Use your resources for your villages. And to help Bryn build its wall,” Tristen said, for he had sent word to everyone about his promises to Bryn: Drumman was here, but his men were already moving to Bryn’s aid. “I ask of you all the same thing. Amefel has a treasure-room full of Heryn Aswydd’s gold. I don’t know the cost of the boats and the grain, but we’ll use that first, build the defenses in Bryn’s lands, and supply food and shelter to the Elwynim that cross to us.”

“We can’t deplete the treasury entirely.”

“I’m told a gold coin is a sack of grain, and I think we have more coins in the treasury than we do sacks of grain in all Amefel.”

That also drew a curious stare. “How many?” was the careful distillation of the question.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Tristen said, and in fact, did not know the tally. But at that, one of the younger Amefin clerks looked as if he had something behind his teeth he was afraid to let escape.

“Sir?” Tristen asked the man, seeing the look.

“Elwynim,” the young clerk said, faintly, and had to clear his throat in mid-utterance. “And the tax collecting. —Which I’m not supposed to know, my lord, but master Wydnin fled across the river when the king came back from Lewen field, and he took some of the books with him. So we don’t have the account of the treasury, not since this summer, and not even the king had an accounting. Parsynan started one. But he went away.” The clerk moistened his lips. “It never was done.”

“We have no accounting? But Tasmôrden does?”

There was a murmur among the lords, all of whom had conspired with Tasmôrden… that Tasmôrden turned out to know more, than they did about what was in the Amefin treasury.

And the clerk’s report made perfect sense. No few of the house servants had fled when it turned out Cefwyn had won at Lewenbrook. The archivist, who might have known more secrets than he had yet told, was now dead, murdered, in the matter of Mauryl’s letters. More, if Parsynan had had a counting in progress, that was a mystery to him.

“Master clerk,” he said, to his own clerk, who had come with him out of Guelessar, and the man stepped anxiously forward. “Do,you have any account the lord viceroy began?”

“No, my lord. I fear not.”

“So that’s gone, too.”

“It seems it has.”

This flood of papers toward Tasmôrden was alarming: Tasmôrden knew very much of their resources, their proceedings, and Mauryl’s correspondence with the Aswydds, Heryn, and those before him… and that contained, surely, some of Mauryl’s notions about defense, perhaps about Althalen, perhaps about wizards and wizardous resources as great as the treasury. It was not alone the accounts that Cefwyn had found muddled when he arrived here, the books all out of order and in stacks on the tables and jammed into the shelves… it was the books of the library itself that had been disappearing to avoid Cefwyn discovering the Aswydds’ fortune and their dealings with Mauryl and perhaps other wizards.

They had assumed it was Mauryl’s writings that had been secreted in that wall, because that was the nature of the burned fragments… but those letters they had burned, he suspected now from going through the fragments, were useless to them. The question was not what they had left as chaff, but what they had taken as valuable, and how long this traffic in books and records had been going on.

And had some of those found their way to Elwynor… missing books of unknown nature, themselves as valuable as gold. The senior archivist was dead, and the junior fled, with what final treasure… and of Mauryl’s writings… or someone else’s?

The archive of correspondence had probably gone into the wall when Heryn knew Cefwyn was coming… and when he was coming the junior archivist had murdered the senior and fled with a few precious items, likely to Lord Cuthan; and Lord Cuthan, confronted with his own treason… fled, again, to Elwynor, leaving behind his own culling of less important, less concealable documents, for they had found certain things left behind in Cuthan’s house that they were relatively sure should have been in the archive. They suspected those were part of the stolen documents… but they had never found the junior archivist, and while they suspected Cuthan might have gotten something past the searchers and into Elwynor, they were never entirely sure.

More and more, however, he was sure it was not just one theft, but a pattern of theft, the slow pilferage of years, and a junior archivist overwhelmed with fear, seizing the best of the concealed items, burning the rest and fleeing for fear of the whole business coming out.

“My lord,” said Marmaschen, who rarely spoke. “Lord Heryn was known for asking gold for favors, besides his surcharge on the Guelen king’s tax. We knew he had accumulated a great deal in the treasury, but no man but Lord Heryn’s closest familiars went there. And his master of accounts. But that man fled to Elwynor.”

“Very likely, too,” said Drumman, “Lord Heryn sold the old king’s life, and had gold for it. So I think. No Amefin will be mourning Ináreddrin, as may be, but that’s likely the sourceof some that’s there. Blood money.”

“And anything Aseyneddin might have wanted to know,” said Marmaschen. “That, too, Lord Heryn would have reported, if gold flowed.”

“What would he do with it?” Tristen asked, and received astonished, confused stares, which he took to mean his question was foolish. “Did he buy grain?”

“He kept it,” Drumman said.

“He had gold plates. Gold cups. He had boxes and boxes of it.”

“My lord,” said Marmaschen, fingering his beard, and in a cautious voice, “does this mean my lord will levy no war tax?”

“I see no need to,” Tristen said. “When there is need, then I shall.”

There was a general letting-forth of breath, as it were one body.

“And the levy of troops?” Drumman ventured. “Will we be taking the field, or does the wall answer the need? We’ve no great disadvantage sending men off the land in the winter, while the weather holds.”

“I hope it will hold. I wish it to hold.” He dared say so with these men. “And Bryn needs all the help all of you can send, to build the wall. The more men, the faster the stones move. And they’ll need ox teams there for the heavy pulling. I’ve delayed the king’s carts as long as I can. I can’t keep them into the spring.”

“The spring planting…” Crissand said.

“We can let the land lie a year if need be. We’ll still have grain. We’ll have brought it in Olmern’s boats.”

That brought consternation.

“Do we understand Your Grace means to supply grain to all the families in the villages and the town as well as to the men under arms? And to muster out every able man in Amefel? Is that what we face?”

“No,” he said. “But to feed an army, that we may. The southern lords will come. Cevulirn will bring them. We won’t let Tasmôrden bring his war here, and I won’t let him have the riverside.”

There were slow intakes of breath, the understanding, perhaps, that all they had discussed with Cevulirn before they had gone to the river had begun to happen.

“So we’re to provide for an army,” Crissand dared say, for all the rest. “And does the Guelen king know, my lord? Or to what are you leading us? Go we will, but to what are you leading us?”

The question struck him to silence, a long silence, gazing into Crissand’s troubled face across the width of the table.

“I don’t know,” he said, the entire truth. “But to war with Tasmôrden, for the king’s sake, and ours, and all the south… that, yes. There will be war.”

“Lord Ivanor’s ridden home without a word.” Azant said. “And to do what, Your Grace? To bring his men?”

“And how will we determine the need for this gold and grain?” asked Marmaschen. “Who’ll decide one claim against another? Shall we simply come with a list and say, Your Grace, give us grain?”

“I’ll ask you the truth,” Tristen said, “and you’ll tell me.”

One lord lifted his head instantly as if to laugh, and did not, in a very sober, very fearful silence. The silence went on and on, then, oddly, Crissand smiled, then laughed.

“Lies will find us out,” Crissand said. “Will you not know the instant we lie, my lord?”

“I think I would,” he admitted, though he had kept from others the truth of the gray space, and what it told him… he judged all men by Uwen Lewen’s-son, and what made Uwen uneasy, he told no one casually. He thought, too, of Cefwyn’s barons and Cefwyn’s court, and how the men there were always at one another’s throats. “But I’d hope none of you would lie to me.”

There was again that silence.

“No,” said Crissand cheerfully, “no, my lord, we shan’t lie to you. And you won’t charge Heryn’s tax.”

“I see no need of a tax, when we have so much gold.”

“But, Your Grace,” Drumman said, “this wall you want… if you,will forgive me my frankness… if I dare say… my men are on their way, with every intent to obey Your Grace’s order. But the Guelen king forbade our fortifications and our walled houses. He ordered them torn down. Dare we do this?”

“Aye,” said Azant. “What will the king in Guelemara say? And shall only Bryn have defenses? We have ruined forts aplenty, from the Marhanen’s order. And shall only Bryn raise a wall?”

“And will we have a Guelen army on our necks?” Lord Durell asked.

“No,” Tristen said. “Cefwyn wouldn’t send one. I’m his friend.”

“His advisers will urge him otherwise, my lord,” said Drumman. “And in no uncertain terms. Your Grace, with all goodwill, and obeying your orders, I’m uneasy in this.”

“I know they’ll be angry,” Tristen said. “But the king doesn’t like their advice, and he’s far cleverer than Ryssand. He knows his best friends are in the south.”

“Then gods save His Guelen Majesty,” Azant said with an uneasy laugh, “and long may he reign—in Guelessar.”

“Aye,” said Drumman, “and leave us our Lord Sihhë.”

“Our Lord Sihhë,” said Marmaschen, “who spends his treasury instead of ours and bids us build walls… walls. I will build, Your Grace. Two hundred men is the muster of my lands, three hundred if you’ll feed the villages through next winter. Do that, and we’ll join Drumman, and raise your wall in Bryn, and then my own.”

“Three hundred from mine through winter, spring, and summer,” said Lord Drumman.

“Two hundred from Meiden,” Crissand said, “no trained men: shepherds… but we sling stones at wolves that come at our flocks. Give us some sort of armor and our maids and boys will man Bryn’s wall. That we can do, and will.”

There was never a doubt Crissand was in earnest, and others named numbers, a hundred from one lord, fifty from another, until the tally was more than Amefel had fielded at Lewenbrook.

“Now is the need,” Tristen said. “Ilefínian’s people are coming south. But so may Tasmôrden’s. We have to set the signal fires, the way we did before Lewenbrook. This, until we have the Ivanim horse to defend us, and then whatever other help will come to us… they’ll come.”

“With Ilefínian fallen, and the snows coming,” said Drumman, “there’s likely no grain to be had in Elwynor. There can’t have been a crop last year in the midlands; there’s none this year: all they sowed was iron. Tasmôrden’s stolen for his army whatever the poor farmers put in, his army’s stolen what they could carry, and now he’ll plunder the capital storehouses, none preventing him… whatever the siege didn’t consume, if there’s anything left at all. Hunger across the river is inevitable, Your Grace is right. Grain is what they’ll want, and even innocent villagers can grow desperate enough to turn outlaw. It’s not all quiet, peaceful folk who’ll cross the river in winter. There’ll be some bent on taking.”

“We’ll give them grain,” Tristen said. “As much as they can carry.” v,

Worried looks had attended Drumman’s assessment; astonishment attended his answer, slight aversions of the eyes, flinching from the notion; but it seemed reasonable to him.

“And if we give it, they’ll be fed, and if they’re fed, maybe they’ll be quiet neighbors,” Drumman said. “But can we find that much grain, Your Grace? Can we get it?”

“We’ll ask the Olmernmen,” Tristen said, in utter sobriety. “Cevulirn is doing that.”

“The king should have pressed across the river last summer,” Azant muttered. “Her Grace was willing. The army was willing. And, no, he turned aside and went back to Guelessar. Now we empty our treasury to feed Elwynor?”

“A sack of grain is one gold coin,” Tristen said, “and if you put it in the ground, it’s a field of grain. Isn’t that so?”

“If you can get the soldiers off the ground,” Azant said. “There’s the matter.”

“With all the starving peasants of Her Grace’s land at our doorsteps,” Durell said. “Save this grain we give of our own accord, and no recompense from His Guelen Majesty, as I understand. And we’ll have more than hungry peasants before all’s done. We’ll have hungry soldiers, bands of them, with no leaders, no thought but their bellies.”

That was so.

“And if there’s famine,” said another lord, “disease, that goes with it.”

“Then there’s need of medicines, too,” Tristen said.

“And is our treasury enough for it?”

“The grandmothers don’t ask much for their cures. But it’s a good thing if we tell them, and pay them.” He had understood this matter of paying folk, finally, so there was bread enough. “And if we don’t have enough herbs for their powders, we’ll buy them from Casmyndan, too. Sovrag’s boats can bring them.”

“And a good store for us, too,” said Marmaschen. “No crops, no store of food untouched in Elwynor, no planting this spring, in all that kingdom. It’s an immense undertaking.”

“And treasury gold to pay for it, Your Grace?” asked an ealdorman of the town. “Recompense, for what we supply?”

“And a fair price,” Crissand said. “The merchants know what that is. Fair price, and fair quantity. Weavers to weave: they’ll need blankets and cloaks. Cobblers, dyers, wheelwrights, tanners, and smiths…”

“For gold?” the ealdorman asked.

“For gold,” Tristen said, and added, because Crissand was right, “at the prices things are.”

“My lord,” said Azant, from the other side of the table. “We know we have our own to save. But I have a question, and trusting Your Grace, I’ll be plain with it. The king cast out Lord Cevulirn, who by all accounts was the only honest man left in Guelemara. All fall long, he’s heard only the Guelenfolk, and shown no regard at all to the blood we poured on Lewen field: he gave us Parsynan, was the thanks we had. I did think better of king Cefwyn, and I know I’m putting my head at risk, here. But he’s only proved himself Marhanen, this far. Your Grace says he loves us dearly. Your Grace trusts him. Your Grace says if we commit ourselves and raise this effort, there’ll be Guelenmen carrying the war into Elwynor and flying Her Grace of Elwynor’s blue banner all the way. Bear in mind our love for you, my lord, but we don’t so easily love the Guelen king, and we’re not altogether sure the Guelenmen are going to cross the river.”

He had wished the earls to speak plainly. And this was the truth, from men who had been prepared to join the Elwynim rebels against Cefwyn.

“My lord,” Crissand had said to him while he chased those thoughts harelike through the brambles of Cefwyn’s court, “my lord, we’ve come here to tell the truth. I said we dared, and Lord Azant’s done it. So now I will.”

Crissand drew forth a small, much-abused bundle of paper which he had carried close to his person, and he laid it on the table.

“My father’s letters sent to Tasmôrden I don’t have, though here are drafts of two of them. But all Tasmôrden’s representations to him of whatsoever minor sort, they’re here. I know they set forth names of some of those present, regarding those promises, and they knew I would do this. We trust my lord’s forgiveness for any here that may be named; if you would be angry at them, be angry at me, first, and any punishment you set on them, set on me, first. I said I would do that. But I trust my good lord, that there’ll be none.”

“No,” Tristen agreed.

“Ask the Bryaltine abbot about letters, too,” Azant muttered, “if Your Grace wants a store of them. Aye, I’ve a few of my own, as damning.” He drew another, neater bundle from his breast, and others laid them down.

They might, Tristen could not help thinking, account for some of the purloined archive, for there was a fair pile of them. And the Bryaltine abbot had trafficked with Tasmôrden? The Quinalt father he had known was inimical to him, but that the Bryaltines, who had sheltered Emuin’s faith, might be a difficulty… he had not suspected.

That meant the Bryaltine abbot was, like Emuin, very good at secrets.

More than one wizard, Emuin had said.

Suddenly there seemed more than one side to Tasmôrden’s scheming, and many to his own lords’ duplicity with Cefwyn.

So the abbot had a glimmering of the gift, in himself, and had carried on treason and never let it be known.

“Uwen,” Tristen said, “send for the abbot. Crissand. Lord Meiden.” He reminded himself of pride, and courtesies by which Men set such great store. “Do you know what’s in the letters?”

“Lord Heryn’s dealings with the Elwynim… with Caswyddian,” Crissand said, and so Lord Azant, red-faced, confirmed his own letters were part of it.

Then Earl Zereshadd broke his long and wary silence, and poured out a tale of Heryn’s dealings. “Caswyddian sought permission of Lord Heryn to come into Amefel, to outflank the Lord Regent’s forces… he’d already crossed the river, but he asked, to keep good relations; this while Prince Cefwyn was in Henas’amef. The Lord Regent was sending messages to the prince, and Lord Heryn intercepted every one. It was an agreement between Lord Heryn and Caswyddian to ambush the prince at Emwy.”

By the prince Zereshadd meant Cefwyn before he was king. And the earls had supported Lord Heryn in his schemes… perhaps, in fact, all of them had conspired with various of the Elwynim pretenders, not necessarily one side, not necessarily one pretender, and perhaps even two or three of them at once, wherever reward offered itself. Deception had been the rule in Heryn’s court, and Cefwyn had known he was living in constant danger. But not the extent of it.

And once started, the other lords had details to lend, perhaps matters which they had never told each other… in certain instances, provoking angry looks, then rueful laughter. Confessions and tale-bearing poured forth like nuts from a basket, everyone with a piece to tell, all of it with new kernels to glean, but nothing more of the greater doings of Lewenbrook than Tristen already knew: the conspiracy against the Lord Regent Uleman, which had driven Uleman into exile and at last to his grave in Amefel, had had Amefin help from beginning to end.

On their side of justice, the earls had suffered under Marhanen prohibitions and decrees. The order that had torn down the fortified manor houses was one such, and was the reason most of the earls lived in Henas’amef, in the great houses around the Zeide. The prohibition against the earls keeping above a certain number of common men-at-arms was another, which had left Amefel no standing army and no stores of arms to which anyone admitted… the disappearance of swords and spears after the last muster was suspicious, and the earls quietly said they would ask among their villages.

The number of men said to be bastard kin within the houses and therefore entitled to weapons turned out exaggerated… but these lords’ houses had paid taxes for generations under the aethelings and the Sihhë and contributed to the building of Althalen and its luxury. Then came the Marhanen tax, and, worst of the lot, there had been Lord Heryn’s extravagance; but they had kept quiet. Lord Heryn had been their own, their aetheling, their claim to royalty and their man accepted by the Marhanen crown.

“Heryn said,” said Marmaschen, “that the tax went to the king. We see it didn’t.”

“What could we do?” Zereshadd asked. “There was no other lord we could turn to. So we tolerated his excesses. And gods save Your Grace, indeed, if there’s as much as you say, it may save us all.”

“There are other reserves,” said Drumman slowly, “since we tell the truth here. More than one of us has laid by against need.”

That brought an uneasy shifting in the seats.

“Truth,” Crissand said. “We promised truth for truth. And hasn’t our lord given us the truth?”

“This is my truth,” Drumman said. “When the Marhanen king ordered the manor houses razed, records were lost; and in the losing of those records, my district preserved reserves with which we hoped one day to rebuild. This timber and stone I will give to the wall. The gold… I will also bring forward.”

There were grudging nods among the others, as if this was far from an unknown practice.

“More might be found,” said Zereshadd, and Marmaschen inclined his head with a pensive expression.

“Your Grace has allowed Bryn to fortify his northernmost village,” Azant pointed out. Azant was also bordering on the river. “Since each has such ruins in our districts, holdings forbidden us by the Guelen king, and since we have reserves for building…”

He understood slowly that justice and evenhandedness meant allowing all such fortifications, if he had allowed them in Bryn: that was what Azant was saying… and there was a great silence in the hall, and an anxious look at him and at Azant, as if seeing what he might do with such resistance.

“First,” he said, “defeat Tasmôrden. First let’s take account of the map and fortify where there’s some chance of the rebels coming across.”

“We will need to leave the court and take command in our districts,” said Marmaschen in a low voice. “At least at the start.”

“I’ve very few couriers to carry messages,” Tristen said, “and a scarcity even of guards, if I send Cefwyn more of his men home, as I have to this spring. I’ve no one, until Ivanor comes north. If I raise a levy for my own guard in the spring, men who’ve not exercised at arms, they’re no defense. I need an Amefin guard.”

“If each of us,” said Crissand, “were to give ten men with horses to His Grace’s service until Ivanor supplies the need, His Grace would have guards and couriers. Uwen Lewen’s-son is a Guelenman, true, but a fine man, and a good captain, and any man of Meiden would be honored to have the post.”

“Twice ten young men,” said Drumman, “and at my own charge. With horses. And past the time Ivanor may arrive. I’ll not have our lord served by another’s men, for pride’s sake, sirs. I challenge you.”

“Men I’ll give,” Zereshadd said, “but where shall we get trained men here and trained men there, and now horses, gods save us, and men fit to ride them?

From under mushrooms? The Guelen king refused us any but our house guard.”

“Send those you can,” Tristen said, “and they’ll learn.”

“Give His Grace at least some with the skill,” Crissand suggested, “and the rest, as likely as we can find. His Grace has no house of his own. Where is he to get them, if not from us?”

“Where will they lodge?” Azant asked. “The Guelens have the barracks.”

The vision of a second barracks suggested a solution: a barracks might stand… had stood… Tristen drew in a breath, having suddenly a location in the South Court in mind, and wondered where they should find the stone… but on a second, more sober thought, simple timber would serve and make warm walls, and timber stood available on the nearest hillcrest—

If, that was, they could spare workmen from carving eagles and embellishing doors that were otherwise sound enough.

“I’ve workmen enough to raise a new barracks,” Tristen said, “and the men you send will camp in the guardroom and the stairs and in the lower hall until there’s a place, and help the workmen… and master Haman. We’ll have our allies here by Midwinter, and all their horses.” He drew a breath. “So. Let’s do everything we’ve promised, and see that we’re ready for what comes.”

“His Reverence is here,” Uwen said, when he had settled in his apartment to sort through the pile of the letters, and indeed he was, a shy presence at Owen’s side, a shy one in the gray space, unmasked, and honest at the moment, though he had never detected it before.

Of all priests he knew, save Emuin, who maintained he was not a priest anyway, this was the only one such he recollected: this one had the gift, a faint one, or one secret by nature. If so, there was some strength in it.

“We were learning Tasmôrden sent to some of us,” Tristen said. “Did he send to you, sir? Or has any other we might wish to know about? We’ve collected letters, all sorts of letters, which came from the north, and you may have some of your own.”

The abbot bowed, and bowed again, white-faced. “Your Grace,” he said in a faint voice, and then took several breaths before starting over. “Your Grace… yes.”

“And what did you answer?”

“Nothing,” said the abbot. “I sent no answer. And if the lord across the river should send again, I would tell Your Grace immediately, on my oath.”

“Are you telling me the truth?” Tristen asked, listening in both realms, and the abbot nodded and bowed fervently.

“On my life, my lord, on my life and on my faith, I tell you the truth.”

It was the truth, at least that the abbot had not betrayed him. The gift glimmered faintly, ever so faintly, full of fear, and there was no deception in the gray space.

“And have you heard from other men?” Tristen asked.

“From Earl Crissand’s father,” the abbot said anxiously. “From the old earl. And him I upheld. The king’s viceroy I cursed,” the abbot added on a little breath, “and all his men.”

“Don’t curse the Guelens,” Tristen said mildly, “since all the Guelens we have left are mine and choose to be here, and Uwen, beside you, is Guelen. Don’t wish ill at all, sir. You can, and I strongly wish you will not.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Blessings and curses alike had abounded in Efanor’s little Quinalt book of devotions. But that book declared they all flowed to and from the gods.

He was not so sure they did not flow from men like this, a slight wizard, a whisper of a wizard, less even than Her Grace, but gifted with a hard, single-minded devotion and a steady purpose. He peeled through it like layers of an onion, bruising nothing, laying bare the heart.

“Go to master Emuin,” Tristen said to the abbot, “immediately, and help him in any way he asks. You’ve helped him before. Help him now.”

“My gracious lord,” the abbot said, still white-faced, and bowed, and sought his leave. Uwen took him toward the door.

So there was a man in the midst of all Crissand’s father had done; and by the letters he had, he knew this man had sheltered noble and common folk alike when the viceroy’s justice was for hanging them.

“Who are these nuns?” he asked on a sudden recollection. “Emuin said there were nuns.”

With women he had had very little to do, and nothing Unfolded to him to tell him whether that was common or not, or whether the gods, whom the Quinalt book said considered women as vessels and not as capable of acting, were quite the same for the Bryaltines. It all eluded him.

“My lord?” said the abbot.

“Are there nuns?”

“Priestesses,” said the abbot in a quiet voice, utterly honestly. “As the Quinaltine never admitted. They’ve been with me for all my service here. But now they go in their habits, and we serve Your Grace in whatever modest way we can. Praise the gods, we do it in plain sight now.”

“The Quinalt doesn’t approve of priestesses,” he said later to Uwen, having taken a second look in Efanor’s little book, and having found what he recalled, that the Quinaltines thought women were a source of evil. But he disbelieved a great deal in that book.

“That they don’t,” Uwen said. “Women’s fine enough by me, howsoever, an’ a smile an’ a wink from a lass is an even better thing, so ye might say.”

“The Quinalt doesn’t agree with that.”

“The Quinalt ain’t in charge here, an’ besides, I fear I ain’t that good a Quinalt.”

“You used to wish to the gods. I seldom see you do it now.”

“That.” Uwen gave a faint laugh. “’At’s a soldier’s habit.” Then he became sober. “I watched the dark come down at Lewenbrook, an’ ’twixt us, m’lord, I ain’t been a good Quinalt since.”

What could he say to such a thing, when he was not sure whether Uwen regretted it or not?

That, however, was the sum of matters from the council, except the abbot’s servants, the priestesses, arrived at his chambers within the hour, carrying a thick parcel of letters, all from the other side of the river, all very small, and tied up with red cord.

“Be assured,” said the older nun, a plain woman robed all in gray and black, “His Reverence never did any of the things the Elwynim asked, save only to send aid to His Grace the Lord Regent.”

To Ninévrisë’s father, that meant, during his time in hiding. That was certainly no fault in the man: treason against Lord Heryn, as it happened, but none to the fair cause.

And the letters were not the only object of curiosity the Bryalt abbot had sent… and that not without conscious decision, Tristen thought, gazing at the women who had brought the letters, the elder a quiet woman, common as any face in Henas’amef. She might have been a grandmother in the market… or perhaps she was.

For there was, indeed, when he probed it, a little spark of a presence.

“Do I know you?” he asked, for the face seemed familiar to him, and the women made a little bow like willows in a gale.

“We served in the Zeide.”

“In this room?” he asked, for suddenly that was the point of familiarity… he recalled women gathered together about sorcerous objects: Lady Orien and all her company, with Hasufin’s presence attempting the breached wards.

The gaze that looked up at him, suddenly direct, was dark and wide and terrified.

“You were here,” he accused her.

“I served the Aswydds,” came the faint response. “But all the while I served the gods, by your leave, lord. As does my sister. Let us go.”

A lit straw, that was all the woman’s wizardry was, the sort a wisp of wind might cause to flare or extinguish altogether… and was not that the danger in what Emuin called hedge-wizards… that they might set a whole field alight?

“What is your name?” he asked, holding her with his stare.

“Faiseth,” she said, or that was what he thought he heard. Faiseth. It seemed to echo here and there at once, and now she knew she was observed. So did her sister.

A presence flitted past him, sought concealment in the gray space. A hare in a burrow, the woman was, heart beating quickly, and her sister with her. She had not wanted this errand. The lord abbot had not wanted it either, and the abbot commanded. So much he knew in an instant. And the other woman…

—“Pei’razen.”

The woman looked at him, stricken, addressed in the gray space as well as the world.

—“Orien’s servants.”

“The gods’ servants, your servants, at your will, my lord.”

He considered the women, and the knowledge he had, as thorough as if it had Unfolded to him. The women concealed nothing, to the walls of their souls they concealed nothing.

It was worth knowing the nature of such servants. It was worth remembering. Such as a lord could lay a ward within a soul, he laid one, sure and fast, so neither woman should betray the house, or him, without his attention, not in all they ever did. They were his.

And sharply a breath came in, and the younger covered her mouth with her hands as if her soul were trying to escape. The other pressed a hand to her heart.

“I’ve not harmed you,” he said, “but you touched the wards of this room on that night, and now I’ve laid new ones.” He abhorred what they had done, but he saw in them now a small, a wavering hope, a desire of life, of favor, of something he had to give that these woman desperately, fervently lacked and adored and sought with all their life.

“What do you wish of me?”

“Nothing, Your Grace.”

“That’s not so,” he said. “What do you wish that I might give you?”

“To be the gods^ true servant,” she said, then, and that was false.

“The truth,” he said, and took it, not that it was right to do, but that they sought mercy, and there was one safe way to pour it out to them. They wished to have skill, to be greater than they were. They wished to be regarded by one and all, feared, for it was fear they had understood.

“You need not,” he said, “be afraid of anyone. You need never be afraid.” He held out his hand, and took cold, thin fingers he could break with the pressure of his hand. He wished her well and wished her sister the same, and she began to tremble.

“Master Emuin would tell you,” he said, “and will tell you, when you go to him, that breaking things is no help.” He warmed the woman’s hand in his, and reached for her sister’s—so slight a pressure, her fingers, against his, as if he held one of his birds. “Don’t do anything so foolish as that again. Don’t curse. Don’t fear anything.”

He let go their hands, but now they tried, in that other place, to hold to him, as if he, after all, was what they had wanted.

“Tell the abbot I thanked him,” he said. “And go to master Emuin. He’ll know all you’ve done. Don’t be afraid of him. Don’t be afraid.”

One and the other, they backed away, wanting his forgiveness, striving to reach into the gray space and not to let him go; but he had no wish to be their answer: he pushed them gently out into the world and shut it as it were a door.

He could not be Mauryl. He was never made to be Mauryl, or Emuin, who could teach. He delayed for a glance at their departure and said nothing to Uwen’s look at him, before he added the letters to the pile.

The darkness had not even bothered to devour these sisters. It had had other prey in mind, and their understanding had never told them their danger.

Meanwhile, while the letters accumulated in lords’ hands, priests had contended with curses while Hasufin prowled the wards like the wolf at the fold… never ask what curses the Quinalt patriarch might have laid on them all a matter of days ago, before he left; but he had felt no trace of it. The wards of the Zeide were sound. The harm a priest could do seemed not to have touched what he guarded.

He went back to his burden of letters and confessions, his accounts and his requests, and his small stacks of coins.

By ranks and rows they stood on the desk to remind him, Uwen’s lesson.

By such means he understood the simpler things that did not Unfold to him, or leap full-blown into his sight in the gray place. The lord of Amefel needed such advice, and had before him the correspondence of the Bryaltines with the enemy, the earls with the enemy, and the earls with the falsified accounts.

Now they began all to tell the truth.

Even Lady Orien’s servants had told him their small truth at the last, and left running.

Chapter 8

A letter from Tristen and a letter from Anwyll arrived on Cefwyn’s desk in the same packet. Idrys brought them, on a cold, rainy night. Something close to ice was spattering the windows of the study. Water stood in beads on Idrys’ black armor, from a recent trip outside.

“Two letters,” Idrys said. “And a bit of news I fear my lord king won’t like. The Amefin patriarch has just arrived at the Quinaltine, with four Guelen guardsmen, and on a lame horse.”

“The Amefin patriarch,” Cefwyn said in wonder. Nothing he could imagine could deter him from the letter he had in hand, but that did divert him a moment. “Why? Did Tristen send him?”

“With guards that haven’t reported to me,” Idrys said, “no. Without a message to me, no. And not wearing the Guelen red, no. Lord Tristen didn’t send them. One man arrived in his proper colors, and came to his officer. The others I would call deserters.”

“With the Amefin patriarch.” Worse and worse news. It was not a flow of information this evening, it was a torrent becoming a flood, and by Idrys’ face, he had only part of it in hand, in these letters. Something was going on that involved the Quinalt. And a man who had no reason to be running errands, at his age, and who was not likely to be running to higher authority on any ordinary matter.

With Tristen in charge in Amefel… was any matter of religion ordinary?

“Report,” he said. “Master crow, don’t deliver me this diced in pieces. I want to know. Report, or hie you downstairs and find out.”

Idrys did not go. He loomed, a standing blackness against the dull, glistening color of the stained-glass window. Night was outside. But a little of it had gotten in with the Lord Commander, as if it were one of those shadows Tristen talked about, the cold spots his grandfather had claimed to feel on the stairs.

The world had been moderately ordered until Idrys came. Now there was no likelihood he would leave this office before dawn.

“The one man,” Idrys said, “the honest man, to all appearances… that one pleads a sick mother. To deliver another piece of unpleasant news, the captain of the Guelen garrison is one that went into the Quinaltine, and my lord king will recall he was captain during your tenure, during Parsynan’s…”

“I know the man,” Cefwyn retorted. “He’s a prig, a hardheaded and objectionable man. And a deserter, is it? A captain of the Guelens, a deserter.”

“The man with the mother says they aren’t deserters, but disguised themselves, and he professes not to know anything, except they went with Lord Tristen’s permission, and met with the patriarch at Clusyn. It was, he says, the patriarch’s idea to disguise themselves, but he had his captain’s permission to go on, because of his mother.”

“Did he come with them?”

“A very interesting point. He came just after Lord Tristen’s message and Anwyll’s. These came by the same man, Dragon Guard, from the river.”

“From the river.”

“So the man says. Lord Tristen was there. Meanwhile the patriarch took to the road—whether Lord Tristen was in Henas’amef or not at the time remains unclear. And if we believe the man with the mother, they disguised themselves and the patriarch, and came as fast as they could.”

“With Tristen’s permission, while he was at the river for some godsforsaken reason.”

“The story is tangled, admittedly. I’d suggest, modestly, my lord king read the letters.”

“You haven’t.”

“I was inquiring after the patriarch. First the messenger through the gates, by a quarter hour later the man with the mother, and half an hour after that, in this weather, draggled and soggy, the Amefin patriarch and the rest of the men. We’d not have known, necessarily, except the one man wearing his colors reported to his regiment first, as he should have, and the captain of the Guelens fortunately had his wits about him and sent for me.” Idrys was dripping on the tiles, as happened… had had no cloak, by the soaking he had had, and a cold rain. Idrys had wasted no time on either end of his passage.

“Your best guess, crow. Guesses, now. Free for the making.”

“I don’t believe any of it. I think our man with the sick mother wants to reach her, doesn’t want to entangle himself—that part of the story is true—with the business at the Quinalt. He’s scared. The regimental captain had sent to know about the mother, who was ill, that was true; but recovered; she was at her house, knows nothing of all this, likely doesn’t know her son’s in the town. I’ve a handful of pieces with no ends that match.”

“I agree. The whole pack is lying in some fashion, and Tristen didn’t send them—no, he sent the man with the mother. I can guess that. He would. Stay. Let me read this.”

“Read, my lord king. I’ve an order to pass, by your leave, maybe a report to receive, and I’ll be back before you finish.”

What order that was he did not ask. The deserters had better secure sanctuary at the gods’ own altar before Idrys laid hands on them, Cefwyn thought to himself, for there was fire in Idrys’ eye.

Ilefínian has fallen. I write this from Anwyll’s camp at the river, where Cevulirn has set Ivanim archers to watch the bridges…

Cevulirn was with Tristen. Anwyll’s camp at the river. The names rang like blessed bells, familiar and sounding of protection, safety, matters well in hand… the two most loyal of his lords, aware of the calamity and taking precautions.

I have set the thane of Modeyneth to be the new earl of Bryn. His name is Drusenan. His wife is Elwynim. He lives in the village.

I have found women and children fled from the fighting in Elwynor and set them in his care. Also I have ordered a wall and gate across the road there, where two hills make a natural defense. The Emwy road is warded.

Tristen broke laws. What else did he expect? Tristen appointed an unknown man to office, and he would wager there was good reason. The south was in good order—in excellent order, except he now knew his carts were farther away.

What shall I do, Tristen? was his silent appeal, which he knew Tristen would no more hear than he could understand two wizards looking at one another and nodding. I need the damn carts, Tristen. Well-done on the riverside, but my gear sits in camp, and it’s the better part of a month to move those carts here.

Idrys’ footsteps heralded his return. Cefwyn ceased reading and waited, as his Lord Commander came back to him.

“News?”

“I’ve sent a messenger to His Holiness advising him things may not be as he’s told. I hear His Reverence was muddy, lame, and bruised. The report I have says he fell off his horse.”

“Tristen couldn’t have done it. He was at the river.”

“At the river, my lord king?”

“With my carts. I know damned well that’s what he’s done. Go on.”

“He’s almost certainly here to complain of the lord of Amefel. But not even the Majesty of Ylesuin can demand entrance into the Quinaltine.”

“We can demand other things.”

“Shall I send for the Holy Father?”

“I want him there till he’s found out something. Advise him so. Get those men with him in hand. I count that a necessity. Damn them for deserters. Damn all they say.”

“And the patriarch of Amefel?”

“A knottier problem. One the Holy Father will have to solve. One he’d damned well better solve. Can you get that to him?”

“I’ll attend to it,” Idrys said, and left. His armor had just dried from the last foray out into the wretched weather. It was unlikely he would stop this time to obtain a cloak.

There were layers of command over the Guelens, the various companies jealous of their prerogatives, the Guelens, the Dragons, the Prince’s Guard, all, all with officers reassigned and no little sorting out of men after his accession, Captain Gwywyn going to Efanor’s guard, Idrys becoming Lord Commander in Gwywyn’s place, and no great love spent on either side of that transaction. Lord Maudyn was a civilian commander on the river, where most of the Guelens were assigned, and some of the Dragons. He hoped Idrys might lay hands on the Guelens that had come in, but there was a delicate matter of protocols involved, and it was credit to Idrys’ oversight that the one man who had reported in had gained Idrys’ immediate attention—averting disaster, Cefwyn thought.

And if they had any more men sifting into Guelessar from Tristen’s command, well to send them immediately to the riverside, to work out their disaffections within sobering sight of the enemy shore.

Ninévrisë arrived in the doorway, robed for evening, her hair about her shoulders; he had not come to bed. She had waited, and he had no idea how long.

But it was not offense which had brought her.

“A page said there were dispatches.”

“Anwyll’s report,” he said, knowing Ninévrisë ached for any message, any shred or scrap of news about her kin, her people, her land and her estates, such as remained of them. “It just arrived. And a letter from Tristen.”

“All at once?” She folded her robes close about her and came to sit and see the letters, not knowing the other things. She read Anwyll’s letter first, brief as it was, and then Tristen’s, a long letter, for him.

“Cevulirn has gone there,” Ninévrisë said.

“And this is all we have,” Cefwyn said. “Look you. Not: Cevulirn arrived… or Cevulirn came to me from Guelessar or a damned scrap of information does he give! He writes worse letters than my brother!”

“He’s building a wall…”

“A royal decree, several laws, and a treaty down at a stroke. It’s the Sihhë wall he means.”

“Gods bless him!” Ninévrisë exclaimed, laying a hand on her heart. “I have made provision for those fleeing the capital since its fall; and also for armed men loyal to Her Grace who may escape. Them I will save if I can … He understands! He’s moved to help them. A place where my men can come.” Her eyes were bright as lamps as she looked at him, and how could he say Tristen was wrong? “He can, do you think? He can have them come!”

“He might well,” he said. He envisioned an Elwynim army, the army he had hoped would rise from the villages along Ninévrisë’s route into Elwynor, but gathering in Amefel, far to the south.

Small chance the remnant of the loyal army would come east to cast themselves on Guelessar’s mercy, or that of Murandys. They would go to Tristen.

And Ninévrisë’s eyes were aglow with hope, for the first time since the news had come to them.

“Tasmôrden’s men will loot everything they can,” Ninévrisë said. “Aseyneddin had some good men, but Tasmôrden scoured the leavings of three armies. He’ll be in Ilefínian till he’s looted what’s there, and he’ll not have his army sober again until they’ve done their worst… so there’ll be no pursuing anyone. They have a chance.”

And failing that, there was a wall at Modeyneth, gods save them: the old Sihhë defense, for Althalen of the last High King had had no walls, only Barrakkêth’s defenses, that wall that ran among the hills of Amefel. It had fallen into ruin even by the latter days of the Sihhë High Kings.

Now a band of Amefin peasants wielding picks and axes were remaking it. And was it chance that Tristen had thought of that wall?

Barrakkêth. First of the Sihhë-lords, Barrakkêth the warlord… whose black banners had swept every field, whose iron hand had struck down his enemies without pity.

He sat with Ninévrisë considering the letters. He sent a page for hot tea, against the chill of the dark. Rain made a cold, rattling sound against the windows.

“He might bring them to him,” Ninévrisë said. “He might even wish them there, once he knows.”

And could he say it was wrong, what Tristen had done? “Never say so,” Cefwyn said, “even in the sodden father’s hearing, but I hope he does.”

The world had gone differently since his grandfather’s day, when his grandfather had used wizards’ help to win his war… much differently than the Sihhë-lord Tashanen’s day, when wizard-work had exceeded siegecraft.

Once magic entered the lists, the advantage shifted incalculably.

Running feet, a boy’s feet. It was not the tea that arrived, but more news in the rainy night.

“His Holiness,” a page said from the door. “My lord king, Your Grace, excuse me. His Holiness is coming up the stairs.”

In this weather?

“Bring a lap robe, mulled wine… Where’s the damned tea, do you know?”

“No, my lord king, please you.”

“Then find it! Bring me what I ordered!”

The boy fled. He had shouted at the lad. He had not meant to.

But if the Patriarch of the Quinalt had met with the patriarch of Amefel and had something to say to him, he wanted nothing out of joint. He went swiftly to the door, leaned out it to shout again. “Boy! Advise Annas! Get me my guard!”

“He’s heard from the priests in Amefel,” Ninévrisë said faintly, from her chair.

“Oh, I don’t doubt he has.” He returned to his seat. The page, forbidden to shout in the royal apartments, ran, steps echoing in the hall. “Don’t fear. Idrys will have it all in hand. The Patriarch himself isn’t to trifle with, and he’s on our side, or I’ll see to it Sulriggan sits on a bridge this winter.”

The tea arrived at the same time the head of his bodyguard came in, Nydas, on night watch, who never excelled at soft-footed approach, and he came in a hurry. The hall had more traffic than High Street at noonday.

“My lord king.”

“Tell Idrys the Patriarch’s here. That’s all. He’ll know what this is about.”

Annas had appeared behind Nydas, a head and shoulders shorter.

“Annas. The Patriarch.”

“Yes, my lord king.”

“Shall I stay?” Ninévrisë asked, with more prudence than he had thought of, and made him suddenly realize, gods, no, the Patriarch would not confess before a Bryaltine and a foreigner and a woman. His Holiness was bought, sealed, and paid for, but Annas and Efanor were the limit of his tolerance for such meetings: guards, pages, and priests failed to count as persons… Idrys not excepted, in that sense. But … no.

“Love,” he said, catching her hands. “Love, Nevris, heart of my heart—go. You’ll have the entire sordid report, whatever it is, from me. But you’re right. Grant me this.”

She pressed his hands, nothing more, and went out in a whisper of footsteps, calling her maids and her own guard outside, and little time to spare, for a breathless page came back to report His Holiness in the corridor outside.

“And white as a ghost, Your Majesty.”

“Well, gods, move chairs by the fire.”

“Here?”

“Here, goose! Don’t breathe like a hound at the chase, just move the chairs. Seemly, now! With grace, there.”

Annas habitually kept a poker hot in the coals and warming bricks on the hearth, and had arranged two cups of mulled wine on a tray before the Patriarch reached the outer doors of the apartment, and had heated bricks for the Patriarch’s feet on the hearth before he arrived.

The man was white as a ghost. His white hair was plastered to his face, and his shoulders were soaked. He had brought no one with him but a young lay brother, who saw His Holiness’s cloak robe off, and the warm dry robe about him, and set His Holiness’s feet on the warm bricks.

Annas needed do nothing more than offer the wine, of which the old man took a great swallow.

“Your Holiness,” Cefwyn began, as Annas shooed the lay brother out with the pages and servant staff. “Dare I guess. The Amefin patriarch.”

“Too far. He’s gone much too far, Your Majesty. You must call him to heel.”

“The Amefin patriarch?”

“The lord of Amefel, Your Majesty, I beg you don’t make light of this.”

“Far from it.” He rested in his chair, the old man sitting wrapped in his robes, looking at death’s door tonight. “The duke of Amefel wrote to me. Oddly enough, his letter and the patriarch arrived the same night.”

“The patriarch and these soldiers waited their chance, when Lord Tristen had gone out of the town; they fled as far as Clusyn, and they were there when a messenger overtook them and went on without rest. They chased the messenger all the way, fearing what that message would say or request of Your Majesty— But His Reverence fell in the ditch.” The wine had spread a modicum of warmth. The Patriarch took a larger breath. “His Reverence ordered the soldiers with him to ride on and overtake the messenger, but when they tried, His Reverence couldn’t prevent his own horse running. His Reverence believes the horse was bewitched.”

“I would laugh, Your Holiness,” Cefwyn said, with a finger braced across his lips precisely to prevent that, “save the gravity of the situation. Horses follow horses. It’s their nature.”

“No luck accrues to anyone crossing his lordship of Amefel. Horses may follow horses, Your Majesty, but disaster follows Lord Tristen.”

“Disaster? Only to his enemies. He owes us only good. We two should be quite lucky, should we not, Your Holiness?”

“Don’t make light of it, if you please. What His Reverence reports is grimly serious.”

Now he listened. “Say on.”

“First, the people hail him Lord Sihhë…”

“So they did when I was there, and His Reverence knew it. That’s no news. He probably is. What of it?”

“The appearance of it—”

“What am I to do? Come down with troops on my friend because cobblers and shopkeepers call out in the street? My enemy is across the river laying curses on me daily. I save my efforts for Tasmôrden.”

“The law—”

His temper flared. He restrained it. “He’s failed in some minute particular of doctrine, probably two and four times daily, not being a good Quinalt. But so does the Bryalt abbot! What of it? We both know Amefel is exempt from the ordinances, and is so by treaty and observance. If Tristen chooses to use those exemptions, he is entitled.”

“Witches. Witches have appeared. Witches traffic in the marketplace, the forbidden tokens are sold without fear of rebuke…”

“They did that when I was there, too. Reprehensible, but hardly new, and His Reverence saw all of it. Had he news, or a history?”

“His Reverence witnessed witchcraft. Lord Tristen has promoted thieves to household service, has displayed the black banners, has consorted with witches, has…” Coughing overwhelmed the old man’s vehemence. “He’s conspired with Ivanor to gather an army and preferred Amefin officers over honest Guelenmen.”

“It is Amefel, the black banners are my grant to him, written down in the Book of the Kingdom, and locally sanctioned by His Reverence, to boot, who’s seen them fly before this, Cevulirn left here: I don’t wonder he’s paid a visit to Tristen. In fact I’m glad he has. So what sent the patriarch of Amefel breakneck to Guelemara, and what has a man I counted honorable and holy to do with deserters?”

“The captain of the Guelen garrison—”

“A deserter, with the other, who skulked away when Tristen was out of the town serving my interests! A deserter, sir, and with the kingdom at war. Tell me how I should deal with them? Shall I encourage every man who has a quarrel with his lord take to his heels? Every man who disagrees with his sergeant?”

“The point is—”

“The point is these men are not credible.”

“But the report they have…” The Patriarch drew an old man’s deep breath, seeming to fight for wind. “Majesty, take this seriously. In the hearing of witnesses, of the Guelen Guard, out in the country, a witch hailed him and prophesied to him. And directly after, the lord of Ivanor appeared as if magic had summoned him.”

“A witch, you say?”

“Up from the roots of a great oak, that seven men couldn’t span with their arms: the tree fell, the witch appeared in a great burst of snow and a wind of hell.”

“I think I know the witch.”

“Majesty?”

“Auld Syes. The witch of Emwy. Dead or alive’s a guess. She’s a harbinger of trouble.”

“And Ivanor came.”

“I don’t wonder at that.”

“After which Lord Tristen has cast down the authority of the garrison, fomented lies against the viceroy…”

“Tristen is a wretched liar. He knows he is. As for Parsynan, he’ll be lucky if I don’t hang him. That was Ryssand’s choice, mind you. I never should have listened to him. Tristen was restrained in dealing with the man. Don’t give me any blame for that. And don’t trust him.”

“Your Majesty.” The tone was one of agony. “His Reverence brought men to swear to these things. He saw sorcery. His claims raise questions, Your Majesty, which I cannot counter. The orthodoxy, which Ryssand supports…”

“Ryssand.”

“Yes, Ryssand.” His Holiness was short of breath, and inhaled deeply before quaffing a great two-handed mouthful of the heated wine. Drops stained his chin, and he wiped them with a trembling hand. “But not only Ryssand. The strict doctrinists… have adherents in the Quinalt Council and the ministries of charity… and they were… they are… adamantly opposed to the appointment of the lord of Althalen and Ynefel to a province. They are doctrinally opposed to Her Grace’s Bryalt faith, and they demand a sworn conversion and a Quinalt adviser at very least.”

“They’ll whistle to the wind for that!”

“I know. I know, Your Majesty, but… but…” Another spate of coughing, another deep draught of wine. “Forgive me. But His Reverence has documents, Bryalt prophecy. In every point, the lord of Amefel fulfills every point of them.”

“The Quinaltine is promoting a Bryalt prophet?”

“Listen to me, Your Majesty! The stricter doctrinists—”

He was wrong to have baited the Holy Father. The old man was greatly agitated, having come here straight from conference with the Amefin father, which might not be the most prudent course to have taken. It was reckless— counting disaffections within the Quinaltine itself. “Sip the wine for your throat, Holiness, and give me the straight of it. I won’t spread it about. The doctrinists. Is it Ryssand’s priests stirring this up?”

The Holy Father shook his head and sipped the wine. He was calmer. A hectic flush had come to his white, water-glazed face, while his hair had begun to dry to a wild nimbus in the fire’s warmth.

“Not Ryssand’s urging. Not Ryssand alone. They are patrons of some of the doctrinists, but so are Nelefreissan, Murandys… all the north.”

“I am aware.”

“I am an old man. They’re waiting for me to die.”

“They can go on waiting.”

“There’s no debate with these absolutists… and they’re not fools. There’s power… power in their hands while they admit no truth but their own. They wish me dead.”

“The king wishes you alive. I imagine even Tristen does, no matter what ill you’ve done him.”

“I—!”

“You have the Patriarchate, Holiness. Use it! Be rid of these priests! You have the electors!”

“I have enough of the electors—but they’re old, too, and divided in their minds. Here we have a displaced patriarch of a provincial shrine, whose authority was not respected, and, having these damning witnesses… witches, Your Majesty… and the people cheering the Sihhë…”

Idrys had arrived at the door, and at a nod, came in, apprised at least of the last the Patriarch had said. He stood, a bird of ill omen and dark news, with arms folded, rain glistening on the black leather of his shoulders.

“Well?” Cefwyn asked.

“The soldiers were legitimately discharged and have written authority to have returned,” Idrys said. “The patriarch of Amefel overtook them after they’d drunk themselves half-insensible at Clusyn. He commanded their escort. When the Dragons’ messenger passed them on the road, they made all haste to overtake him, but His Reverence met with a haystack and a ditch. The Dragons’ messenger not unreasonably thought them bandits and rode for his life.”

Ludicrous. He could imagine the scene, the descending dark, the patriarch in the mud, the courier, one of the elite regiment, in desperate flight from the patriarch of Amefel.

“I beg you take this in all seriousness,” His Holiness said. “The devout fear this, among the electors, they fear us all endangered by witchcraft and wizardry, and Your Majesty must remember these are honest men, genuinely offended by these goings-on in Amefel… if nothing else.” A cough brought another recourse to the wine cup, which must be nearing its bottom. Cefwyn had not touched his, having no wish to numb himself.

But the Patriarch clearly had no caution left tonight.

“Threats of violence,” the Patriarch said, “omens. There are such, as there is magic.”

“No man who stood on Lewen field denies that, Holy Father. What omens, and is it time we sent to Emuin? If you can’t stop them…”

The Patriarch shook his head. “No. The Teranthines are no help, and Emuin is less, in this business. I come here… I come here… in hope of reason. Receive the Amefin patriarch, hear him patiently, realizing… realizing that what he says the doctrinists take as the very substance of their fears, so much so… some preach actions… actions which would aim at the lord of Amefel’s life.”

Idrys was not at all smiling, his dark-mustached face utterly intent on what the old man was saying.

“Buren,” Idrys said, naming a name which had at least crossed his desk, a hedge-priest, a wild-eyed sort.

“Buren, Neiswyn, all these barefoot sorts.” The Holy Father manifested no love for them either, and in truth, they were of long standing, going about the countryside praying over cattle and orchards and making their living off charity. They had always been at odds with the well-fed priests of the great Quinaltine. “Ryssand’s priests support them, call them holy. This is what we can’t counter. These are holy men!”

“Holy troublemakers.”

“This Buren wanders about,” said Idrys, “prophesying, speaking in vaguest terms about unholiness abroad in the land and blood on the altar. It’s nothing new. He derives a living from it. He always has.”

Self-made prophets not within the Quinaltine turned up, and vanished, and said things not quite blasphemy, not quite treason… and did so freely, since they couched it in prayers for the cleansing of the kingdom and the Quinalt.

“Your Majesty,” His Holiness said in anguish, “it’s reached a point of danger. There it is. This has come at a very bad time.”

“Then I suggest you draw a distinction between sorcery and wizardry in your homilies, Holy Father, start now, and nudge your doctrine toward some measure of reason on the subject of magic… and soon.”

“I dare not!”

“I suggest you dare, Holy Father. I more than suggest you dare. You have authority over His Reverence. Wield it! Modify his testimony! Be in command! The doubters and the ones who’d follow you are looking to you to know what side to take. Give them a signal, for the gods’ sake!”

“I am an old man, Majesty.”

“Would you be an older one? Act!”

“Yes, Your Majesty. I’ll try.”

“Well that you came tonight. Bravely done. Annas, see His Holiness back to the Quinaltine in good order, and dry and warm.”

“Your Majesty.” It required an effort for His Holiness to rise, between the wine and his exertions on the stairs. Annas assisted, while a page brought the lay brother back, insisted he keep the dry robe, found a dry cloak for him, and helped him on his way.

All the while Idrys had waited; and as the door latched, and they were alone:

“Two letters from His Grace of Amefel,” Idrys said, and drew out a small, unsealed missive from his belt. “Yet another messenger chased the lot of them… a postscriptum, at considerable effort. I did read it.”

“Is it bad?” Cefwyn asked, with a sinking of his heart.

“Only what we know,” Idrys said. “The Lord Tristen realized the danger in the patriarch’s flight.

He arrived home, evidently to find this, and bent a great deal of effort for his second rider to reach us before His Reverence and the guardsmen did. I find it worth remarking that he failed… considering his abilities.”

“I can’t assess his abilities,” Cefwyn said, and took the letter and sat down.

Be careful of the Quinalt father who has left Amefel and gone to the Quinaltine. He did so while I was absent and Uwen had no authority to prevent him, yet I wish we had done so. He is angry with me.

Regarding the fortifications at Modeyneth and elsewhere I mean to pay those out of the Amefin treasury. Many of the earls are ready to lend help. Also the earls are willing to lend me men for an Amefin company, which I will set in order by the spring and send you the rest of the garrison at Henas’amef, as well as Anwyll.

The work on the wall seems likely to go quickly. I hope that in all these things I am doing what you will approve.

Raising an Amefin company for his guard instead of the Guelens was well within sense. The duke of Amefel had that grant of power from his hands. It was the only thing in the message that was clearly within Tristen’s grant and honor.

“You’ll note the bit about fortifications,” Idrys remarked.

“My grandfather’s decree to bring down their strongholds was a good idea then. It no longer is. I regretted not having them this summer.”

“Will you tell that to Ryssand?”

“Damn Ryssand. Damn the Amefin patriarch.” He folded the letter and tucked it into his own belt. “At least we’re prepared in the south. What he’s doing will turn the war north, when Tasmôrden hears it, mark me. He’s being left no choice. And if he doesn’t move toward him, we’ll be the hammer and Amefel the anvil. Damn Ryssand twice and three times, he and Murandys will catch the arrows if Tasmôrden invades. And as for Ryssand… I may let my brother’s marriage go forward.”

“You jest.”

He swung around and fixed Idrys with a direct stare. “Artisane’s husband would inherit, were Ryssand to fall in a ditch. My brother might be duke of Ryssand and duke of Guelessar.”

“Shall I find the ditch?” Idrys said.

“After the wedding.” He found himself well out on a limb, far, far from safe ground. “But maybe not. I’m not my grandfather.”

“Your grandfather died in bed, my lord king, a grace the gods did not grant your late father, who spared his enemies.”

“My grandfather died fearful of ghosts, master crow.”

“And does my lord king fear them?”

“There has to be a wedding, before an inheritance. I’ll think of it then.”

“Think now, my lord king. If not Ryssand, then these troublesome priests. The Quinalt won’t fault you.”

“One doesn’t win by killing priests. They multiply. They become martyrs. Gods know we need none. His Reverence of Amefel will get his comeuppance, when His Holiness wakes up and uses his wits. Then Ryssand will have his, if my brother weds the Ryssandish minx. He far underestimates my brother.”

“As my lord king wishes,” Idrys said, “and again, as my lord king wishes. And a third time, as my king wishes.”

“Plague on you! You don’t approve. Say so!”

“Consider, I say, that Tristen himself would have wished his messenger arrived timely; but he came too late. Our revenant is still fallible. Wizards failed.”

“He asked a man to make up days on His Reverence. He failed. It’s not portentous.”

“His Reverence fell in a ditch. And alas, survived it. Failed, I say.”

“He’d not wish for a death,” Cefwyn said, and wondered in himself why he held his hand. He had not been so moderate once. He followed a wizard’s path without a wizard’s power.

He wished not to be his grandfather, that was the truth. He wished to win his battles on the field, not in some ditch.

He wished not to become the king his grandfather had been. That dark pit was always there, a defensible place, a lonely, loveless place… and he had been on his way there, when he had met Tristen, and met Ninévrisë. He had listened to Heryn Aswydd, adorned his gate with heads of men who might have been his best allies, had he only known how he was deceived.

Then in Tristen’s company, seeing the mystery of forest leaves and the wonder in a water-polished stone, a light had come on him, a bright, bright hope, that this was the true world, all around him, truer than his darkening sight. And ever after that and forever, he hoped for himself, and whenever he thought of dark and practical deeds, why, that light distracted him toward this dream he had, and made him, perhaps, not a good or a reasonable king, but a king who wanted to be better, a king who wanted all his kingdom to enjoy their lives.

“My lord king?” Idrys prompted him, and he knew he had been woolgathering, looking toward that nonexistent but oh, so real light, dreaming, not being responsible toward his duties.

“Let’s trust His Holiness,” he found himself saying, covering that soft part of his soul that could deal with Tristen and his crownless queen, and finding the reason to gloss it over, undetectable by Idrys’ critical eye. “He sees his danger: it’s inside the Quinalt. Let’s see what he can do about it.”

Chapter 9

The wind blew and blew in the dark of night, battering at the windows in the dark, spitting rain, not snow, wailing around the eaves and rattling shutters.

“Like a spring wind,” Lusin said, “an’ us not to Midwinter yet.”

Tristen remembered the gray rain curtains that had swept down on darker gray towers, and knew with a vague edge of fear that at last his year was coming full circle: someone named a characteristic of the coming season and it did not Unfold to him; he recalled very keenly the look and the feeling of it at Ynefel, the crack of thunder, rain, creeping wormlike along the horn-paned window of his. room.

Here, his servants went anxiously about, even Tassand casting worried looks at the besieged windows, and saying it was unnatural.

“It’s only wind,” Tristen said. “A true wind.”

Yet he had wished fair weather on the south and all the ill to the north, on Tasmôrden’s army, and if it rained here, he thought it might snow to the north.

It was still his wish, ,and for more of it, but he feared such tampering with nature. He thought, as the storm raged and thunder rolled above the roof, of going to master Emuin and asking. But Emuin slept, when he wondered: was snug in his blankets in the tower, ignoring the fuss in the heavens, and would not be nudged to wake-fulness.

If master Emuin could sleep through the racket, he supposed it was not so harmful… but he could neither sleep nor ignore it.

Neither, it seemed, could Uwen, who had been down to the stables and now came back with his boots wet and his cloak dripping.

“Not natural, m’lord, for it to be so warm so late in the year. The yard’s a mud puddle.”

“No trouble, however.”

“All’s well, as I saw.” Uwen slung the cloak off, and a servant took it. “It blew the lantern out, and the horses is all glad to be in. Liss don’t like the thunder.”

“Take a cup of ale,” he said, for he knew Uwen liked it at the end of a long day, and so they shared a cup, and talked of other things, the building of a second barracks in the scant free space of the Zeide court. That would go faster in warmer weather; and so would the training of the Amefin guard, which Uwen meant to oversee.

Uwen went off to bed, then the thunder quieted, and Tristen felt the pigeons all snugged close, a sleepy feeling, somewhere near in the eaves and the stable loft. Warm, warm together, and peaceful, they felt.

And with master Emuin sleeping, and all the world quiet, the fire crackling and the spatter of rain against the windows, he found sleep still eluding him. He read… read philosophy, the sound of the rain comforting and peaceful. When he slept, he slept in the chair, and so Tassand found him in the small hours of the night, and threw a blanket over him.

In the morning Tassand called him to the window, that portion of clear glass amid the colored, and showed him the hills.

They all showed brown, with patches of white. The snow had gone, bringing the land back to autumn, all in a night.

“Do you see?” he said to Uwen, as he came in for breakfast.

“Aye,” Uwen said, “and a soggy mess of mud. I saw it from the stable-court steps: I weren’t goin’ down in the muck before breakfast. Did ye ever see such weather?” Then Uwen laughed. “O’ course ye hain’t. All’s to find.”

“Have you?”

“No. A manner o’ speakin’, m’lord, ha’ ye ever seen? I ain’t, not like this. The streets is runnin’ torrents, an’ the streams’ll Flood.”

Flood Unfolded to him in a dismaying instant, bridges hit hard by trees, livestock and houses swept away. He had not thought of that in his wish. He wondered how much water was bound up in the snow.

“Are the villages in danger?” he asked. “The bridges?”

“The bridges is to ask,” Uwen said, “but the villages is generally set high, the countryfolk bein’ no fools. Amefel’s had floods afore this, an’ they’ll have brung up their sheep last night, I’ll warrant, when they heard the rain.” ,

He had been careless, he had cast hardship on people who trusted him, without thinking of the consequence to them. “I wish the weather may be kinder,” he said.

“It was you,” Uwen said.

“I think that it was,” he confessed. “And just as much rain as fell here, I wished snow on Tasmôrden… not enough to prevent the people from crossing the river. Now I wish the ground may dry.”

“Then if it don’t happen by unnatural sort, I wager the winds’U blow,” Uwen said. “An’ blow for days.”

And indeed by the time breakfast was done, the wind had risen. When Tristen took the accustomed tribute of bread to the pigeons on the ledge, their feathers were ruffled, and their wings beat hard when bad manners shoved one another off the edge.

But despite the wind the morning was bright blue and clear beyond the glass, and the change in the land was a curiosity. “I may ride a turn, today,” Tristen said to Uwen, who stood by to watch. “I should see how the streams run. Dys wants exercise.”

“It’ll be muddy,” Uwen said. But all the same they laid their plans, for they had very many horses due to arrive, and before this master Haman had had men out in the snow and the frozen ground walking the fences and building weather shelters and moving hay and straw—against the belief that the winter was sure to deepen, and that what they must do by Midwinter they must do now. Now the whole effort to prepare the province waited for boats, and streams swollen with melted snow ran to the Lenúalim, on which transport of grain depended—all such things had become a worry. They had sent a message to Olmern, overland… a cold and soggy messenger, last night, if he had not stopped in a village… that, too, his wishes had done.

He vowed more caution, and went down to a muddy yard somewhat sheepishly, not to confess the reason of the sudden turn in the weather, or the source of the rising of the wind that tugged at canvas shelters and whistled through the eaves, on this bright blue morning.

“A fine mornin’,” Uwen said, seeming to take it all in stride. “Only so’s we get cold for a few days yet, enough to freeze the fleas in the sheds, as I can swear ain’t happened yet.”

“Do they freeze?”

“Time was ye were askin’ me what winter was.” Uwen said, “an’ now ye’re sendin’ it away. Aye, fleas do.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to wish against what wants to come,” Tristen said, “and master Emuin slept through it all. He calls me a fool, which is probably true. It shouldn’t have rained last night. But I didn’t think of rain. I thought of snow and ice melting and never thought of rain at all.”

“So will we have fine weather for ridin’ today?”

“I think we will,” he said. “Except the wind.”

The pigeons walked about in the morning, slightly damp, looking confused as they dodged among the puddles, but dodging about on very important business, always, at least to look at them.

Haman’s lads, as Uwen called them, saddled Gia and Gery and the guard horses, for Lusin was coming down, with Syllan and the rest. ,

“It’s a muddy mess down there, m’lord,” Haman advised them as they waited. “And there’s only piles of timbers as yet where the shelters will stand.”

“We’ll have a look, all the same,” Tristen said. “Uwen says the streams will be up.”

“The east meadow’ll be under, afore all,” Haman said, “but the timber’s on the high end, where we’re building, m’lord. There’s nothing lost, I’ll wager, and grass laid bare, which if it dries before the horses tramp it down, is no bad thing.”

It meant less need of hay, less clearing of stables… perhaps no need of shelters at all for many of the horses if the weather held; but dared he do that? They were not at Midwinter yet. Had the heavens a store of snow that must fall, before all was done?

He saw he needed to face master Emuin and have his word on it, if master Emuin would tell him a thing. He saw he needed inquire afresh about the state of the villages, and pay at his own charge any losses: fair was fair, as Uwen said, and none of the folk of Amefel had merited flooded fields.

He could not have done such a thing when he walked the parapets at Ynefel. He could not have done it before Lewen field. He was not sure when or how the gift had Unfolded in him, perhaps that very day that he and Cevulirn rode home and he foresaw the plight of the fugitives in Elwynor, harried by armed men. Pity and anger had moved him; and could he say he had thought as much as he ought before his heart swept the hills clear?

Young lord, he could hear Emuin chide him, in that tone of disapproval, don’t ask me.

How could he ask Emuin… when by all he knew Emuin had no such strength in him, an old man and frail, and very likely this time to disapprove what he had done. He did not look forward to that meeting, and did not want to face Emuin with only a guess how the land had fared. He wished to see it, and assure himself by the sight of what he could see that he had not done too great a harm, that villages and the settlement at Althalen alike would have come through it undamaged.

They had no official need, however, and escaped the display of banners and all the commotion that went with them. On what had become a windy, damp morning it was no procession, only a snugly cloaked faring-forth, down the streets where shopkeepers were sweeping debris from their walks, past the small repairs of battered shutters and fallen roof slates and tattered awnings.

The day was, despite the fierce wind, warmer, and the town had gone from white to brown and unlovely. The jewelry of ice had crashed in ruin from the eaves of buildings up and down the street and lay in dull heaps. Everything was muddy water and piles of ice and dirty remaining snow, all the way to the gates. The gutters ran full, and great puddles of cold water stood in the lower town, through which the horses went with disdain.

Outside the gates and to the west lay the establishment of the stables, the pigs, the geese, the cattle, all manner of pens and sheds, and some of those pens were covered in water.

South were orchards and sheep pasture, and near the walls, the untidy small dwellings of the gooseherds and cowherds and kennels and their yards, many of which had standing water. The granaries were on a mound, and stood clear. And to the west and north and up the nearer hills, the pastures spread out. Those that master Haman claimed for the horses were, by his foresight, the best drained and finest, where the land had streams running from the hills, but no threat from rising water.

Dysarys and Cassam, his and Uwen’s heavy horses, had pride of place in the stables, and when they came within sight of the stables, there they were in the first two paddocks, out to tramp about on this muddy morning. They were Cefwyn’s gift, and had their own grooms from the day they were foaled: when the horses came, so the grooms came to Amefel, and there was some little ado while they turned Liss and Gery, their light horses that had been on call in the fortress stables, out to the paddocks for their turn at sunlight and room to run, and ordered the boys to brush down and saddle Gia and Petejly, their other two mounts, for the trip back up the hill.

That brushing down was no small task, for the horses out in the pens had all coated themselves in mud this morning. Well-groomed hides stood up in winter coat and caked points, and the stablehands were brushing and combing their charges in pens all along the row.

More, Lusin and the household guard, too, had sent for their second horses, and a sorry-looking lot they faced in exchange, to the stablehands’ great embarrassment.

“As we didn’t know ye were comin’, m’lord.”

“Saddle ’em. An’ no mud on the gear,” Uwen said gruffly, and without any grace for the weather. Haman would say much the same: horses should have been inside this morning, kept ready. “Suppose there’d been Elwynim across the river. Suppose we’d had to saddle, an’ ever’ man in the Guard callin’ for his horse, an’ them muddy as pigs! Get to it!”

Boys ran.

“They’ll roll,” Tristen said, seeing Gery do exactly that, turned out in the paddock. She waved her feet in the air, then rose triumphant, with a fine muddy coat.

“Horses,” Uwen said in disgust, but there was little he loved better in the world than being in the stables and having his hands on a fine horse.

Dys and Cassam, however, were clean and brushed, first among all the horses, and had no more than spattered legs. They were ready to ride, to Tristen’s great pleasure, and with no ado at all. The guards’ were not.

“Get us some horses,” Lusin protested, “with His Grace bound out and us afoot. Damn the mud.”

“We’ll not be far,” Tristen said. “No great need. Uwen will be with me.”

“M’lord,” Lusin said unhappily.

“At my direct order,” Tristen said. “We’ll be riding just down the lane.”

Lusin was not happy, but in a trice they had saddled Dys and Cassam and he and Uwen were out down the safe lane between the rows of paddocks, an unprecedented lack of guards, a privacy Tristen found pleasant. Dys and Cassam were in a fine, cheerful mood, for they used the light traveling harness, not the heavy fighting gear, and that meant it was exercise and frolic, not work: both were tugging to have more rein as they reached the end of the paddock lane.

“Oh, we’re full o’ tempers this mornin’,” Uwen said. Indeed Cass was taking Dys’ excited mood, throwing his head, working his mouth at the bit, both horses tending to a quicker pace as they made the turn. “Hold there, ye scoundrel.”

The great feet spattered puddles far and wide as Dys took to a quicker and quicker pace, and Cass did, and step by step it was riders and horses in the same wild rejection of discipline, mud flying. They made a wild charge past fences and to the very end of the paddocks, far, far past the lane.

“To the trees,” Tristen called out, his heart cheered by the lack of troubles they had found. The wind stung his face and his eyes, tore at cloaks and manes, and had a bracing edge of cold.

“We told Lusin,” Uwen began, but the horses’ excitement swept them on, and it was only a little distance more. Off they went, as far as the skeletal gray trees, and the turn there that led to the west… the west, and riders on the road.

There were no pennons, no color about them; and they were not Iyanim. Tristen drew in quickly, and Uwen beside him, at once in sober attention, Dys and Cassam fighting the rein now, for they had well-taught notions what to do with strangers confronting them, and now the high spirits were for a charge and a fight.

But the riders, three men, who looked as if they had ridden far and slept rough, never changed their pace, though it was sure they had seen they were not alone.

“M’lord,” said Uwen, “I’d have ye ride back. At least stand fast an’ let me ride to ’em an’ ask their business.”

“No,” Tristen said. They had their swords with them, if no shields. They never left the Zeide gates unarmed or unarmored.

“Ye got that plain cloak, m’lord, an’ no color nor banner showin’.”

“Let’s find out their business all the same,” he said, “and let them explain who they are.”

They came a little farther, then, until at a stand of beeches on one side and a flooded patch across the road, they had come within hail. “I’ll bespeak ’em,” Uwen said, Tristen saying nothing. “Hullo, there! Ye’d be men out o’ Bryn, or what?”

Then the riders did stop, on the other side of the flooded patch. “Messengers,” said the foremost, and raked his hood back, showing a bearded face, and it in want of trimming and shaving. A rough sort, they all looked. “We’ve come to meet with the Sihhë-lord in Amefel.”

“An’ to whose pleasure, if it ain’t his sendin’?” Uwen replied. “As it ain’t! What business have ye?”

“With him, I say.” The speech was not a common man’s, not Amefin, nor like any but Her Grace’s, and hearing that lordly tone, Tristen slipped his cloak back, showing the blood red of Amefel and the black Eagle beneath.

“You?” the man asked, suddenly respectful. “Your Grace?”

“Tristen,” he named himself. “Duke of Amefel. Messengers from whom? Not from Bryn.”

“Elwynor, Your Grace.”

“My men had orders to gather in weapons.” He saw a sword at a saddlebow, and for the rest there was no knowing what the men hid: armor at very least, perhaps heavier armor than his and Uwen’s, but he trusted to his own skill.

Yet his remark brought no threat. Instead, the leader of the band dismounted from his weary, head-hanging horse and went to one knee in the mud at the edge of the puddle.

“They said at Althalen Your Grace had given them leave to make a settlement, and we’ve come to ask shelter for all the men in our company, our arms to serve Your Grace.”

“Ye didn’t come by the bridge on this road,” Uwen said, “where His Grace has appointed ye to cross.”

“No. East. East of Anas Mallorn, such as we could, where we could.”

“Gettin’ horses across in this weather,” Uwen said in amazement. “A hard thing, that.”

“A raft and rope, sir, all we had. We crossed to Bryn, but the lord in Modeyneth said we should go to Althalen, and so I sent the company there under a sergeant. But we four came to pay our courtesies and ask…” The officer had taken to trembling, there exposed to the cold, and the others slid down from their horses and caught him up, themselves in no better case. “To ask your lordship for relief for Elwynor,” the man reprised with a fierce effort, “and to swear to your banner, because we ‘twill never swear to the likes of Tasmôrden.”

“So all of us,” another said. “Lord, men, and horses, numbering near sixty, of ten houses, all to your service.”

“Such houses as they are now,” said the third. “And our lands all cinders and ash.”

They were no common soldiers, by the sound of their speech: Tristen had learned that distinction, little attention he paid to it when men were as brave as these seemed. They were noble by their actions and by their deeds, and while armed Elwynim were the very presence he had wanted to keep away from Henas’amef, considering his duty as duke of Amefel, here were Ninévrisë’s men, at war with Tasmôrden, carrying their quarrel into his borders.

But here, too, were horses near to foundering and men who had camped or ridden through the storm he had raised. He felt keen remorse for their hardship.

“There’s food and shelter ahead,” Tristen said, “for you and your horses.”

“I’ll walk, by your leave,” the foremost said faintly. “I can’t get up again, and my horse can do with the relief.”

Indeed the man set out walking, wading knee-deep through the water, unsteady in his steps and leading his horse, and so the others walked, leading theirs.

So Tristen and Uwen rode on either side of them, escorting them all the way to the paddock lane, and the muddy track there.

“Ho!” Uwen called out as they came down the lane. “Boys for these horses, an’ quick about it! See to ’em and mind them legs! These horses has come through that storm an’ through flood!”

Boys appeared from sheds and shelters, and so, too, did Lusin and the rest, from the grooms’ shelter, near the wall.

The bedraggled Elwynim managed to walk that far, where Aswys and other senior grooms marshaled a warm place, dry blankets, and a cup of warmed wine apiece, even fresh bread and butter… at which the grimy-handed visitors could only stare in exhaustion and desire, too weary even to eat more than a few bites.

But Tristen, wrapped in a warm cloak and having dry boots, as these men did not, sat by the fire and listened, with Uwen, to the account of men whose news was as they feared, that Ilefínian had gone down in looting and confusion, and that very little of Elfharyn’s force had escaped the walls at all.

These men’s company, losing touch with any coherent resistance, had run from east of Ilefínian to the river, and escaped with their weapons and their horses, by great resourcefulness, expecting to live like bandits in the hills of Amefel and to get a message to Ninévrisë, to learn whether they might have refuge.

“But from the new lord in Bryn we heard different things,” said the foremost, whose name proved to be Aeself, a lieutenant, a nephew of Elfharyn’s line. “We heard in Modeyneth about the old wall and Your Grace and Mauryl Gestaurien, and so we came to offer all we have, ourselves and our weapons and our fortunes such as they are.”

All they had was very little, except weapons and exhausted horses, but not of little account was the courage and the persistence that had carried them this far, to a town that, before, had seen the heads of Elwynim messengers adorn its gates.

“Sleep,” Tristen said, for he judged these men had had no rest last night. “Come to the Zeide when you have the strength, and borrow horses for the ride up. You’ll show me on maps where you crossed.” It was in his mind that what these men had managed, more might do, and not only Ninévrisë’s men. They lacked sure knowledge of such crossings as scattered intruders knew to use.

To Uwen he said: “Find two riders to carry a message to Althalen. Tell them their men came here safely.”

“Better send more grain from here,” Uwen said. “Wi’ horses to feed, they’ll need it, and it’s quicker than sendin’ to Modeyneth.”

“Do so,” he said.

“Tents,” said Uwen. “And axes and good rope; that too. ’At’s a whole damn village they’ve become, m’lord, and now there’s a company.”

No longer the domain of mice and owls, Tristen thought, and as he was taking his leave, Aeself, falling to his knees, insisted to swear, and gave his oath to him.

“Take my pledge,” Aeself said, “to be your man in life and death, and gods save Elwynor.”

“So with the rest of us,” said Uillasan, oldest of the three, and went to his knees and took his hand and swore.

But Angin, the last and youngest, said, “To the hope of the King To Come… for I’ve seen him.”

That brought sharp looks, even from Uwen.

“I’d have a care there, m’lord,” Uwen said for Tristen’s ear alone, “and not take that oath from him. It ain’t wise, an’ it ain’t loyal.”

“What Uwen says I regard,” he said to the young man.

“All of us think it,” said Aeself, “and damn us if you like, the boy’s said it for good and all, my lord. You are our lord.”

He saw the distressed looks of the Guelenmen who guarded him, and Uwen’s look, and the shocked faces of the grooms, Guelen and Amefin together.

“I was Shaped, not born,” he said bluntly, “and some say I’m Sihhë and some say I was Barrakkêth. That may be. But I say my name is Tristen, and while I say so, not even a wizard’s wish can turn me to any other creature.”

“What my lord wills,” Aeself said, and so the others said, in exhausted voices, wrung thin by cold and hardship, men sinking to the last of their strength.

“Take care of them,” Tristen said to the grooms, for it seemed added hardship to send them to horseback again, and up the hill, when they were only now warm and eased of sodden armor: here in the grooms’ quarters were men skilled in medicines and armed with salves and every comfort for men or horses. “Send them up the hill when they’re well and able.—Are our horses ready?”

“That they are, m’lord.”

“An’ as for what they said and what they wished to swear,” Uwen said gruffly, “an’ all ye witnessed, the wine come over ’em, is all. Talk, an’ ye’ll have me to deal with.”

“The wine came over ’em,” Aswys said. “’At were the case. Isn’t a man here heard aught else or remembers it, or I’ll skin ’im, m’lord.”

Heated wine might have brought out the oaths, so Tristen said to himself, and held in his heart what Uleman had said of him, and what Auld Syes had said, and now these men.

But the Elwynim might hail him king or High King or whatever else they wished: things were true in a wizard’s way of speaking that were not true to ordinary Men, and the converse, as well. He had been Barrakkêth and he was not, while he was Tristen, Mauryl’s heir, and that was what he chose. Sihhë-lord Barrakkêth might have been, and lord of all the lands the High Kings ruled, but he had never been king, in the sense the later lords had been.

“If it were true I was Barrakkêth,” he said to Uwen and Lusin and the rest on the way back to the gates, while they were still outside the streets of the town and alone, “if that were true, still, Barrakkêth was never King. What the Elwynim think doesn’t change that.”

“Wine an’ truth,” Uwen said, riding bay Gia beside Tristen, on honest, shaggy Petelly. “They meant it wi’ their hearts, an’ think they’ve sworn. So thank the gods His Reverence is in Guelessar. Their lord dead, one an’ the other, an’ the Elwynim lookin’ for their King To Come for the last sixty years, so who’s to say? That old prophecy’s been rattlin’ about for sixty years lookin’ for a likely place.”

“This is not that place.”

“Ye’re Sihhë an’ you’re a lord, an’ ye must say that’s uncommon in Ylesuin, m’lord.”

“Duke of Amefel, Cefwyn’s friend, and Her Grace’s. Mauryl’s heir. Emuin’s, someday. That’s enough.”

“Ye should say so often enough the Elwynim hear it,” Uwen said, “beggin’ pardon, m’lord, but I’d be damn careful to say so, because the Elwynim’s apt to get notions.”

The people who on festive days called him Lord Sihhë in the streets saw nothing unusual in his coming and going on this day, and lacking the signs of an official procession, they only paused in their business and bowed as he passed.

A handful of children ran along beside, untrustable and noisy, at which Petelly also looked askance. Such were the hazards of Henas’amef. It had assumed a beloved, homelike character, even its obstacles and hazards: he loved it, he decided, and the men in the stable threatened that love… threatened him as much as they helped Her Grace.

He had to make them understand that. They wanted from him what he could not give, and wanted to give him what was not his to hold… what he had never held. This was his Place in the world, his, Crissand’s, the two of them, as Barrakkêth had valued Crissand’s remotest kinsman, long, long ago—so he fancied, yet remembered nothing, saw nothing further Unfold. Three riders from the north could threaten his peace this winter, and ride in on the wings of storm, but he drew a deep breath and willed his land quiet, and his visitors safe, and the war far from the people he battered with rain and wind—far gentler enemies than otherwise threatened them.

Deep let the snow lie on Ilefínian, deepest there, and give no relief to the enemy; and a blessing of wind on the south, drying the puddles, drying the fields. Let the river empty out the flood, and give easy passage to Olmern’s boats, and let them come to feed the hungry and to provision the defense of Amefel: that was his business, and he found in all he saw that he had not done badly.

So he wished. And when he reached the citadel again, and his own apartments, he gathered up his maps, he called in Crissand, and sent also to Azant, as the lords nearest to hand.

“We have guests,” he began, in the intimacy of what was, at other hours, his dining table. “We have guests in the downhill stables and others at Althalen. An Elwynim company escaped, with its weapons, and swears to our service.”

What the men had wished to swear to him, and what they might have sworn in their hearts, he did not say, nor did Uwen. By now he was sure the men were sleeping, and likely to remain asleep for hours.

In all of it since his return he was aware of Paisi slipping about, and running here and there for master Emuin, and by now he was aware that master Emuin was listening to all that happened.

It seemed superfluous to mount the stairs to master Emuin’s chamber, but when he had told Crissand and Azant all he knew, he took that belated course, quietly, even meekly.

“Well, well, well,” Emuin said when Tristen shut the door at his back and faced him, “and what have we done today, young lord?”

“I’ve settled Althalen with a village and had men swear to me as the King To Come.” He flung all of it out, the bald truth, and felt oddly abashed. He feared in the matter of inviting the Elwynim there was very much more than he had yet accounted of, and that he had been very much the fool Emuin called him. Done was done, yet not as widely or as publicly as might have been… or might yet be. He was at least forewarned.

“Well, well.” Emuin was seated at his table, charts spread far and wide and weighted with dubious small pots and a teacup. “And you say you’re distressed, young lord? But are you quite surprised?”

“I wish nothing to Cefwyn’s harm. And what shall I do?” His voice sank, so difficult was it suddenly to utter. “I find myself afraid, sir. The Elwynim are in the stable, with men who’ve sworn to me not to talk. But they said it, all the same. And they will say it, and the lords of the south will come here, and what will happen then? This army is Cefwyn’s army. Elwynor is Her Grace’s, not mine.”

Emuin rose from his table and turned his back, setting his face toward the window shutters. Paisi was out and about somewhere, for which Tristen was thankful: he could at least speak without another witness.

“Cefwyn knows,” Emuin said in a voice as quiet. “So did his father, for that matter.”

“Ináreddrin? About me?”

“Cefwyn wrote to him this summer saying he had found the Elwynim King To Come. Saying also he’d bound you by an oath of fealty—underhanded, since at the time you had no notion what you are, and presumptuous in the king’s way of thinking, his son and heir taking oaths from…” Emuin gave a long breath. “From the heir of the Sihhë. And directly after, Ináreddrin rode south in a fair frothing rage of suspicion… which sent him into the Aswydds’ ambush, failing a little of delivering all the Marhanens to one battlefield. There was folly, if you wish an example of royal extravagance. He could have sent someone. Sending subordinates would have changed everything, a fact I’ve urged on Cefwyn most vehemently. And Ináreddrin died for that extravagance of passion.”

He heard it all in alarm. And one thing came clear to him. “Cefwyn knew.”

“Oh, no doubt.”

“He knew the prophecy when he gave me Althalen.”

“Oh, aye, indeed he did. For that matter, young lord, I thought long and hard on what he’d done. But do it he must, perhaps, one way or another, and chose the easiest course, with no blow struck.”

“I’d not strike any blow at him. Ever.”

“Of course not. You call him your friend. So now we may wrestle with prophecies, and wizardry. He’s your friend, and therefore has avoided the worst pitfalls. He knew from the first he laid eyes on you that he saw something uncommon in you, and yet he liked you well, and he made you his friend on my advice. That was my advice to him, and it served him very well.”

He was struck to the heart. “I’m glad you gave it, sir. But only on your advice?”

Emuin shook his head. “No, not only on my advice. He does love you. That’s the truth of it, as you love him.”

The fear was no less. “What should I do? And do not you give me a glib answer this time, sir. Should I take horse and ride back to Ynefel and face his enemies? Perhaps…” The thought had come back to him, as he had thought this fall, that perhaps Mauryl had set a limit to his Summoning and Shaping, and that there was no time for him beyond this year, or some night this spring. “If Mauryl’s spell vanishes with some midnight this spring, that would solve it all, would it not? Will I vanish, with it? And should I?”

“I don’t know,” Emuin said. “As to wizardry, I see no reason the spell should end.”

“I do. I see very many reasons, if Mauryl had any care for the Marhanen.”

Emuin looked at him with the arch of a white brow. “Care for the Marhanen? None that I know.”

That gave him no cheer at all. It had begun as a remarkable day, and the day came down to dark in one frightening admission after another.

“Was Mauryl their enemy? What was in those letters to the Aswydds? This is where you lived, was it not? What was in the letters?”

“Ah. A good question.”

“Then answer it!”

“Mauryl used the Marhanens to bring down the Sihhë. They were not friends, but they saw the use in each other… as Selwyn Marhanen exempted two wizards from the Quinalt ban. I was one.”

“And Mauryl the other. What of the others who helped him at Althalen?”

“Dead. Three there, others over the years. One in Elwynor.”

“In Elwynor!”

“Dead, I say. An Aswydd. Taryn was his name. But if he were alive, I’d know it.”

“How can you not have told me this?”

“Perhaps because it doesn’t matter. Taryn Aswydd is irrelevant to you. The others—”

“The others—”

“May have relevance. The Aswydds living and dead Cefwyn exiled from this province. Dug them up, hauled them out of their tombs, and sent the whole lot over the border to hallowed ground in Guelessar. That for necromancy. The only one missing is Taryn, in some tomb or grave in Elwynor.”

“I need your advice this time. I know you wish me to think of things for myself, but in this, I ask you, sir, tell me most solemnly what you see.”

Emuin breathed deeply. “Advice? I’ll cut through all the cords at once. One stroke. As I advised Cefwyn to win your friendship, I advise you… win his.”

“Have I not… his friendship?”

“Win his.”

Emuin at his most obscure, most informative, and most obdurate and maddening. A dead Aswydd in Elwynor, live ones in exile in Guelessar, Elwynim down in the stable, and Emuin talked of friendship. Cefwyn had lamented that trait of obdurate silence, and cursed it, but Tristen did neither, at the moment. Curious strictures bound Emuin, he had begun to know that: to know somewhat, and not to know enough, and to know that naming a thing had power… that was a burden. He had let loose a wish for snow and fair weather and had almost loosed disaster, unthinking.

The narrow escape sobered him, chastened him, made him think twice how he railed on Emuin, who did very little and that after long, long thought.

“Thank you, sir.”

“For what?”

“For your constancy. Your silence. Your thinking things through.”

Now Emuin laughed, of sheer surprise, it seemed. “Mauryl said I was fickle as the breeze.”

“As hard to catch.” Now the boy Paisi was on the stairs, thumping and gasping, carrying something heavy, and their time of privacy was ended.

Win his. Win Cefwyn’s friendship, of all tasks Emuin might have set him the dearest to his heart, and perhaps the thorniest. He had come here almost in despair, and now opened the door for the boy with a light heart and a consciousness that, no, he no longer was the boy, the wizard’s fetch-all and carry-all. Master Emuin had set him a task he could do, and wished to do, a great task, a lord’s task.

Paisi had baskets with him… supper, meat pies, by the delicious aroma. “Shall I fetch for you, m’lor’?” Paisi asked in dismay. “I didn’t see your guards, m’lor’.”

“I escaped them,” Tristen said, and went his way out the door and down the steps as if his feet had wings.

Below, far down the hall, two of his exasperated guards did find him. So did importunate workmen, pleading that the doors had to be finished, and they were fine carpenters, not makers of stables.

“Yet it’s stables and barracks we need,” Tristen said in all patience, “so we needn’t have axes at these doors again, if you please. Finish your carvings later. Make them fine when there’s time. Now we need beams up, and roofs.”

“Get along there,” Lusin said… only Lusin and Tawwys had come for him. “Shame, to be pestering His Grace with plaints and preferences, gods bless!— M’lord, the Elwynim has come up the hill, or Aeself has. The others… master Haman’s seein’ to ’em, sayin’ they’ve the look of fever an’ he don’t want sick men in the town.”

Disease and all the ills of war, Tristen recalled the warning. Would an unscrupulous wizard unleash that against them? Any gap in their armor had to be seen to.

“Master Haman can deal with fevers,” he said, “but all the same, go up and tell Emuin. He’ll have something for them, to prevent it. He’ll know.”

“Aye, m’lord.” Tawwys was up the stairs in a trice, but Lusin stayed below with him, and the two of them walked toward the stairs. “Cook’s sent supper to the little hall, m’lord, an’ a small table set, countin’ the visitor.”

“Set out the maps,” he said. “Not all the maps, but sufficient to ask the man where he went and how he crossed, and where Tasmôrden might be, and doing what.—And I’ll want a clerk, to have it all written down.” The whole day had passed in one rush after another, and Lusin caught a passing servant, sending her running for the archive and the clerk.

He would write to Cefwyn with what he learned. He would deserve Cefwyn’s friendship.

Meanwhile Uwen was coming down the stairs, and Crissand joined them from the west, in from the stable-court, with his bodyguard. Durell was close behind him.

Likely curiosity had spread through the court, until he had as well have used the great hall for his welcome to Aeself and the rest. Lords he had not summoned were finding excuses to come, and obtain an invitation.

“Here, and here,” Aeself said, a noble conversant with maps and charts, a commander willing, in the carrying-away of the dishes of their simple supper, to move a trembling and much-injured hand over the canvas map and show them all what he knew.

“There,” he said, drawing a line by Ilefínian to note the presence of Tasmôrden’s forces, and the road that led up to the border and the riverside Cefwyn defended, all but one of its bridges destroyed. “The Guelenmen move with heavy wagons,” Aeself said, “and this Tasmôrden expects.” He had a cough, himself, and took a sip of wine laced with one of Emuin’s potions. “So Lord Elfwyn believed the reports we had. My lord is dead, now, almost beyond a doubt… and so all this army…” Aeself passed his hand over the region of the town. “The gates did not withstand him. They opened.”

“Force of arms?” Tristen asked. “Or did he use other means?”

“My lord…” Aeself lost his voice a moment, in coughing. “I don’t know. They opened at night, and if a man of ours would do it, then damn him for it, but we don’t know how, otherwise, except wizardry, and that we don’t discount.”

“Is he known to have such help?”

“He’s known for one himself, my lord.”

That was not quite a surprise, counting that the claim to be a High King meant Sihhë blood, however thin.

“But sufficient for that?”

“No one knows. Some say it’s all trickery, to fulfill the prophecy. Some say he hides what he does have, and sheds his soldiers’ blood when he could win past without a battle, all to hide his wizardry from us. To this hour we don’t know.”

Either a strong wizard or not: again, no news, and Tristen had no knowledge of his own on the matter.

“We were on the outside of Ilefínian,” Aeself continued, “had been, attempting to bring relief to the town, back from the north. But when we came there, we found the gates breached, the earl’s men inside looting the town. We attempted to turn the tables on him, and besiege the besiegers, but he was cannier than that, and we rode into archers at the east gates. So twenty-two of us died, and the Saendal, the damned brigands, dragged two more of us down. It was no honor to us that we ran, my lord, but I looked to save something, and we’d no prospects there. There was no knowing then where the earl was. They knew where we were, they always knew, and if that was natural, he’s a clever man.”

“What do you think?”

“He claims the Kingship, and he claims to be Sihhë. He has to have the blood, so he has to say so, true or not. He has somewhat the look.”

“Does he?” asked Crissand, and Aeself faltered.

“Not so much as m’lord does,” Aeself said faintly. “Seeing him, one knows the difference, as I’ve never seen, not in my life.”

“Tasmôrden’s army,” Tristen said, unwilling to allow that to go further. “Where?”

Aeself touched the map, the circle around Ilefínian. “Here’s the most of his forces, which with the loot and the taverns, isn’t likely moving. And here to the east, there’s a shred of Her Grace’s men under arms, that the earl hasn’t gone to take yet, but the loyal army is thin, they’re thin, my lord. There’s force on the earl’s side and force in his hands, and there’s some who say he is what he says, and has the blood, and the magic in him, but if he has, he can’t keep his men out of the wine stores. That saved us, if anything.”

Tristen listened, hands braced before his lips, eyes fixed on a canvas land that became visible to him with Aeself’s telling, and a fair telling it seemed to be. He had come to Emuin in fear, he had come from Emuin in hope, and now he saw the quandary laid before him… bad news regarding the forces at Ilefínian, bad news regarding Her Grace’s loyal forces in the country, and a bad outlook for the eastern bridges where Cefwyn proposed to force a crossing, but Cefwyn had foreseen that would happen, and had good maps… had taken the best maps, as he knew, out of Amefel, leaving him older, less reliable ones. He had brought two good ones with him out of Guelessar, but they informed him no better about the height of hills or the difficulty of a given road.

Aeself might. Aeself, however, was all but spent, and had grown more pale and more unsteady as a fair-sized supper and the ale combined with the volley of questions. Now he looked torn between desire to be believed and the exhaustion that was near to claiming him. Tristen set a hand on Aeself’s arm, and said, “Will you go back to your friends, sir? Or rest in the Zeide tonight?”

“At my lord’s will. But I’d rather go to my comrades.”

“Go,” he said. “Tawwys will escort you down.” He reached into the gray space as he said it, and gathered nothing of presence there, as he had not for these men from the time they had met.

But within that space he could do some things he could not do in the world of Men. He brought out a little of the brightness of the gray space, and encouraged the life in Aeself: he snared a little of that silvery force and lent it to Aeself, so a ring on his wounded hand flared with an inner spark—and Aeself gathered himself as if he had gotten a second wind, and looked at him with trepidation.

“My blessing on you,” Tristen said. He had gathered that word with difficulty out of Efanor’s little book and Uwen’s anxious seeking; but now, faced with pain, he knew the use of it, and he saw the ease come on Aeself’s face, and the light into his eyes.

“My lord,” Aeself said, all open to him, utterly, so that what Aeself knew he was sure he knew, and it was not great. A second time he touched Aeself, this time on the hand.

“Go. Rest. Take the little basket with you.”

Emuin had sent down a collection of simples during their supper, odorous little pots, wizard-blessed and potent, Tristen was well sure, salves and pungent smokes that would cure horses and men alike. And Aeself understood him, and the need for silence: Aeself saw how authority sat in this small council, and that he met as a man among men with these friendly lords, needing no kneeling or other signs of respect. M’lord he was. He made that enough.

“Go,” Tristen said again. “M’lord,” Aeself said, and taking the basket, took his leave.

His guests, still standing about the table and the maps, had no awareness that something had transpired in that last moment. Durell was contentedly diminishing the quantity of wine remaining.

Crissand, however, sent a thoughtful look at Aeself’s back, a look not completely pleased.

“You find something amiss,” Tristen said quietly, between the two of them.

“No, my lord.”

He caught Crissand’s eye by accident and the gray space gaped around them, not of his own will.

He was amazed. To assail him in the gray space was temerity on Crissand’s part, a rash venture at meeting him in wizardry, on his own ground.

The gray place exposed hearts without mercy, and that exposure Crissand might not have realized until it was too late… for Crissand whipped away from him, angry and ashamed, and the gray winds swirled and darkened steadily.

—That he has sworn to me? Tristen wondered, and would not let Crissand go or break back into the world of Men. Are you jealous? Why?

Crissand was snared, and could not escape. And shame burned deep in Crissand’s heart.

In the world, he bowed his head. “My lord,” Crissand said, red-faced, and all the while Durell sipped his wine. So with Azant.

But he looked straight at Crissand, in whom, more than any other, of all the earls, he saw a love, not of what he was, but of him.

But what Crissand wanted he wanted with a great, a heartbending passion, exclusive of others. It had become a stronger and stronger one, his rebellion just now an assault of love and need, desperate, and now confounding both of them in its sudden, disastrous misdirection.

—Have I offended you? Tristen asked.

There was a stilling of the clouds then, a great heartbroken calm.

—The wrong isn’t in you, but in me. I’m Astvydd, doesn’t that say it? The flaw is in the blood. I was not with you. For all of this, I haven’t been with you, and now you have an army without us…

—You’ve found this place. Who told you?

—I followed you, my lord.

Followed him, indeed. Friendship, love, jealousy, all had broken down the walls. And Crissand had perhaps done it before, but at distance, and learned what could set him in danger.

—Being here is easy once you find the way, Tristen said. Isn’t it? That’s the very easiest thing. You believed me when you swore. Believe me now. Jealousy moved you.

—Truth, Crissand said, downcast, then, fiercely: But we are your people, my lord. We were first.

He weighed that, and a sudden sureness made him shake his head.

—For now. But there’ll be a day I’ll only have you for my friend. You’ll sit where I do. You’ll be the aetheling. So Auld Syes said. Have you forgotten that? Or didn’t you hear?

—Never in your place, my lord!

—Never separate from me, Tristen said, oddly assured and at peace in his own heart. But not lord of Amefel. Lord of Althalen and Ynefel. Cefwyn was right, was he not?

“My lord,” Crissand said aloud, shaken, and pale of face.

“Go home,” Tristen said, then, to all the company, and Crissand, too, bowed and went his way, downcast and ashamed.

He went with Uwen and his guard.

But he was with Crissand while Crissand walked the hall, and while he gathered up his guard near the doors.

He was aware when Crissand walked out and down the stable-court steps, in fearful thought.

He was aware and while he himself walked upstairs and Crissand walked, farther and farther away, across the muddy cobbles of the stable-court, seeking the West Gate, and his own house.

He left Crissand standing confused on the damp cobbles outside the gate. “My lord?” Crissand’s guard asked him, finding his young earl lost in thought.

But Tristen did not approach him further, only left him to think his thoughts, and to reach his conclusions, inevitable as they must be.

Aetheling. Ruler of Amefel.

He went into his apartments, into the care of his staff. He suspected that, in the stir the two of them had made in the gray space with their quarrel, Emuin had been aware, and that Emuin at least did not disapprove his action—or his warning to Crissand.

He gave his cloak to Tassand, his gloves to another servant, let a third remove his belt, and set his sword in its accustomed place, by the fireside.

Illusion was the writing on one side of his sword, and Truth was written on the other.

And he had learned the edge was the answer.

Finding Crissand’s edge was no simple matter. Crissand he feared would cause him pain, as he had caused Cefwyn pain.

They were models, one of the other. Cefwyn had doggedly followed Emuin’s advice, regarding him; now he must do the same for Cefwyn—and for Crissand.

He took up his pen, dipped it in ink, wrote on clean paper what he dared not say openly, but what he hoped Cefwyn would understand obliquely… truth, and illusion, trusting Cefwyn again to find the useful edge.

“Ye should rest,” Uwen said, straying bleary-eyed from his bedroom. The candles had burned far down. Some had gone out. It was the dead part of the night, and nothing was stirring but the wind outside and the steady battering of wind against the windows. “Ye don’t sleep near enough, lad. Now what in hell are ye doin’ at this hour?”

Now that Uwen said it Tristen felt the weariness of actions taken, decisions made, the small hope of things accomplished. Before him, he saw a stack of matters dealt with in a night that for many reasons, Emuin’s answer and the Elwynim and the confrontation with Crissand included, had afforded him no prospect of sleep.

It was the second such night in a row… yet weary as he was, he had no inclination to sleep.

Uwen had gone sensibly to bed at midnight, but his face too, candlelit, stubbled with gray beard, seemed weary and fretted with responsibility and his lord’s sleepless nights.

How much had Uwen watched, he asked himself.

“I nap,” he said to Uwen. “Go back to your bed. Don’t worry for me.”

“I don’t know where ye find the strength to stay awake,” Uwen said with a frown, “or again, maybe I guess, an’ I’d ask ye take to your bed like an ordinary lad an’ rest your head if I thought ye’d regard me. I don’t know whether witchery’s a fair trade for hours again’ a pillow, but honest sleep is afore all a good thing, m’lord, and makes the wits work better, an’ I’d willingly see ye have more of it.”

“I’ll try. Go to bed.”

He thought that Uwen would go away then. But Uwen lingered, came closer, until the same circle of two remaining candles held them both, the other sconce having failed.

“Ye recall,” Uwen said quietly, “when ye was first wi’ us, how ye’d learn a new thing and ye’d sleep an’ sleep till the physicians was all confounded. D’ ye recall that?”

“I do recall.”

“And now it don’t happen, m’lord, ’cept down there in hall, wi’ you an’ young Crissand staring back an’ forth an’ not a sensible word. Ye don’t sleep. Ye’re not helpin’ yourself.”

“No,” he agreed. “I suppose I’m not.”

“An’ by me, my lord, I’d far rather the sleepin’ than the not sleepin’, if ye take my meanin’. So I ask ye, please. Go to bed. Take some wine if ye will. But try.”

He had been all but set on a more forceful dismissal, but of all others, Uwen did not deserve a dismissal or a curt answer.

Indeed, differences. A change had happened in the way he met the world of new things, and the way he ordered Men here and there. What new things he encountered did not so much Unfold to him these days as turn up inthe shadows of his intentions, warning him only a scant step before he must wield the knowledge. His life had acquired a sense of haste, and feeling of being a step removed from calamity. He was engaged now in battle with paper and clerks and carpenters, with Elwynim companies and grain from Olmern, with the adoration of desperate men and the jealousy of his friends.

He resented sleep.

But… Flesh and blood as well as spirit, Mauryl had indeed warned him, with the sharp rap of his staff on the steps. Crack! Crack-crack! The echoes still lived in his memory, still made him wince. Pay attention! Mauryl would tell him. Uwen had told him. Should he not heed?

“See here,” Uwen said with a sidelong glance at the brazen dragons. “Will ye take my bed? I don’t have any of them things leaning above my rest. I don’t wonder ye don’t sleep un’erneath them damn things, but rest ye must.”

“I promise. I promise, Uwen. Go off to bed. I’ll put myself to bed in a very little time.”

Uwen looked doubtful, and began to leave, then turned back, feet set.

“Swear,” Uwen said.

“By the gods?” he asked wryly, knowing Uwen knew where that study sat with him, in Efanor’s little book.

Uwen said not a thing. But neither, now, would Uwen leave.

“I’ll go to bed,” Tristen said, conceding. “Go on. I’ll not need Tassand.”

“Tassand’ll have my head if I don’t call ’im,” Uwen said, and went off to do that.

So difficult things now became. And now Uwen had set his teeth in the matter of his master’s difficulties and would no more let go than a dog a bone.

“M’lord?”

Uwen was merciless, and insistent.

So he took himself to bed, attended by two sleepy servants, loomed over by Aswydd dragons.

Then, lying still in the dark, he found himself at the edge of exhaustion, and afraid, wanting just the little assurance things in the place were in order… he stretched out his awareness as thin and subtle as a waft of air to the rooms around him, touched Uwen’s sleeping thoughts, and his guards’ drowsy watching at the door. Gathering sleep was like pitching a tent for protection, stretching thin ropes this way and that to ground he knew was stable.

And when he extended his curiosity farther still, he was able to reach Emuin, who was distracted, and a boy, whose feet were cramped in new boots, and who kept Emuin’s night hours.

He had not alarmed them or even attracted notice in his tenuous wandering. The boy poured tea and served in fear, his concentration all for the gray-haired untidy man in the tower with him, while Emuin chased the mysteries of the stars through his charts. The boy thought mostly of food and whether he dared reach for the last small cake.

It was enough: he had succeeded once at subtle approach, assured himself his household was safe and folded around him like a blankest.

He spread himself thinner and thinner on the insubstantial winds… was aware of all the servants and the guards throughout the Zeide, all about their own business when they were not about his; he was aware of the town, asleep but for a few who watched or worked, and one man of ill intent whose hand shook under his attention and faltered of the lock he had meant to open.

The man ran, and did not elude him, but hid shivering in the shadows, in fear of justice that might last him for days.

But fear was enough, unless he found the man twice.

He sailed away, longed to reach Crissand, but in this fey mood sent his thoughts past that house, down the street, to the gates.

He was aware even further, of men and horses outside the walls, and villages drowsing under a sifting of snow north and south of Henas’amef.

He felt the lonely camp at Althalen, and the soldiers’ camp on the Lenúalim’s cold and windy shores; he dreamed of wings shadowing the road, broad, blunt wings, peaceful in the night. Snow began, and fat flakes whirled and spun beneath those wings.

He had found Owl, so his dream told him. At last he had found the source of his fey restlessness, and rode Owl’s thoughts, as Owl showed him all the land from high, high above.

Owl flew right across the village of Modeyneth, the guard posts, the bridges, and the river, and soared on above the land of Elwynor, to a city afflicted by siege and ravaged by fire.

There was Tasmôrden. There was the enemy that threatened Ninévrisë’s people and Cefwyn’s peace, and Owl circled above that place, finding the insubstantial Lines of the fallen town also broken and faltering in their strength.

Now he was well awake in this dream, and angry, and violating every sense of caution he had urged in Crissand.

He saw, yes, the faint glow of wizardry about Tasmôrden, not that Tasmôrden himself wielded it well, but that it was in the air of the place, and that somehow it moved there, raw and reddened and white with struggle.

There was wizardry about the town as well, ragged blue of guard and ward, Uleman’s making, Tristen thought: that clear light, however fragmentary, was like Uleman’s work, Ninévrisë’s father. His care, his courage, all, all defended Ilefínian, but had not prevailed to hold it. The ragged red had come in on the edge of sword and axe, leapt up in the burning and smoldered in the glow of embers.

Bodies, untended and unburied, lay frozen in doorways and at shrines, under a dusting of snow that began to bring innocence back to the night.

A banner flew above the high fortress of Elwynor, and he knew that banner… not the black-and-white Checker and Tower of the Regent of Elwynor, no, but a black banner, a single star that was very like the black banner of Althalen.

With a crown above the star.

Was it a vision of things now, this very night, and was that the banner Tasmôrden claimed? If so, dared this man appropriate to himself the land and honor Cefwyn had given, and then set a crown on it, the emblem of a king?

Away, he wished Owl, on a thought, and Owl soared away south, bending a long, long turn, and crossed the river again far to the west, where Marna Wood shadowed the snow, and glimmered with far more potent wards.

Up, up, up and aside from the barrier, Owl’s wings tilted sharply, and Owl took a dizzying plunge through buffeting winds as Owl met something and flinched.

Suddenly Tristen found the wind rushing past him and the earth rushing up.

Air turned to substance, became the bedclothes, and the frantic pounding of his heart became a leaden rhythm of recent threat.

He was still in midair, even lying on his bed. That was the way it felt. And Emuin had stopped his pen, having blotted his page. His agitated next reach overset the inkpot. He righted the pot without a second thought and held his breath at the feeling that shivered through the night.

—Tristen? Emuin asked.

—Safe, he said within the gray space.

Yet the west in the gray space shadowed dark as his dream, and the winds blew cold to the bone.

—It was a dream, sir, no more than a dream.

—Was it? Emuin asked. Hovering there within Emuin’s heart was a question and a fear directed toward that shadow, for that was a deep and dark one.

But in the east, now, a second shadow grew, a niggling small one, and a faint glow of light that had no explanation.

And a third, in the north, where the black banner flew.

—There is a wizard, Tristen said, and sat up in bed, catching the covers about him against the chill. There is someone, here, and here, and here. Do you see the glows, sir? It is more than one. One’s come close… one’s followed me…

—Be careful! Emuin chided him.

But Tristen flung himself out of bed, caught the bed covering around him and trailed it to the room next, losing it as he reached the hearth and his sword that stood against the stones. He snatched up the hilt and slung the sheath off.

The silver inscribed on the blade, Illusion, flashed in the dim light, and the sheath clattered across the floor. Naked, sword in hand, he faced the window into the shadowed night, and saw all the town of Henas’amef flared up in Lines beyond the glowing Lines of the Zeide’s walls. There were all the wards, all the magic of craftsmen and householders warding their own doors and walls: the common magic of parents and homekeepers and the pure trust of children… all these things Unfolded to him in that unworldly glow, block by block, house by house, outward toward the great defensive wall of Henas’amef itself, a blue bright Line often retraced and constantly tended.

Something had challenged them.

But they held. They held.

Uwen’s reflection arrived in the glass, Uwen’s pale skin ghostlike across that angular maze of Lines before his vision. Uwen’s silver hair was loose and at odds about his balding temples; he had his sword in hand and a cloak caught about him, nothing more, nor asked the nature of the alarm… he had simply come, armed, to his lord’s side, the two of them naked to the cold of the threatening night and the glory of the town.

“The Lines,” Tristen said, “all have leapt up. Stand, stand still.”

“What does ’e mean?” Other reflections arrived, night guards coming in from the doorway, servants from their quarters and the back hall.

“Nothing’s gotten in,” Tristen said. He was aware of all the Lines before and below and behind and above him, even with his eyes open, a net in which he stood; and then of the stairs that ran to Emuin’s tower.

At that, he was aware of E^rnuin, who with stealth and subtlety he was only learning had been there for the last few moments. Emuin stood with him, there in the gray space, and the blue lines glowed softly, running along the edge of the steps of Emuin’s tower and down and down again and along the lower hall on the opposite side, and up again, quick and live as the spark of the sun on winter ice.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked.

“Nothing has come in,” Tristen said. “The place is safe.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said, and the guards with him said nothing at all, only looked about them uneasily.

Then, only then, Tristen set his hand on the stone of the sill and wished the whole town safe.

Only one place resisted him, and it was that discontinuity of stones in the lower hall, that change from old to new that marked the join of the old fortress to the new: from the first time he had confronted it he had known it was a weakness in the building.

And was it lack of courage, he asked himself, that he did not tonight go down and dare that black middle of the eastern hall?

Was it, instead, prudence, that he did not directly challenge what at the moment was doing no harm… and what had, with the whole town, resisted whatever his foolish curiosity had roused out of the dark.

He traced the one compromised windowsill, drawing the Line with his finger, and willing it sound and safe.

Then he could say, with some assurance. “I’m sure now. Go back to bed. Go back to bed, all of you. The threat is gone.”

The night guards went, quietly and doubtless to talk among themselves once they reached the hall. Uwen’s reflection remained, pale ghost against the dark that now filled the window.

“I dreamed of Owl,” he said to Uwen. “There’s wizardry abroad.”

“Aye, m’lord, that I rather guessed.”

It struck his fancy, Uwen’s quiet humor. It touched his heart with a relief almost to tears, that Uwen still dared deal with him as friend and guide, and he would not profane that offering or examine it.

“I don’t think it’s a danger tonight.” He turned and faced Uwen’s solid presence with his own, and handed Uwen the sword he held, for he did not trust his own steadiness to sheathe it: his eyes were still bemazed by the vision of Ilefínian and of Henas’amef, and the black banner and the Lines. “Tasmôrden is flying the banner of Althalen.”

“Is he?” Uwen failed to ask how he had seen that, and simply heard it for the truth. “He ain’t right wise, then, is he, m’lord? You an’ His Majesty will have summat to say on that score, I fancy.”

“That we will,” Tristen said, not without thinking of Auld Syes’ birds, and the use to which he had put Althalen’s ruins. Tasmôrden thought to claim back or kill those who had fled his brutal seizure of their land; and by that banner Tasmôrden thought to claim not merely the Regency but the High Kingship, the office the Sihhë-lords had last held and which Cefwyn himself did not aspire to hold.

And did he fly it defiantly above the devastation of Her Grace’s capital and the murder of its citizens?

“Go to bed,” he said to Uwen. “Forgive me the commotion.”

“Forgive you, m’lord, when I persuade ye to sleep an’ the whole night turns on its ear? If something’s amiss out there, it certainly ain’t your doin’.”

“Nor mine. I know now I didn’t draw the lightning stroke on the Quinalt roof. And Cefwyn had to send me here. I had to come. The Quinalt father has gone where he has to go, and Aeself and his company have all come where they have to be. Lord of Althalen and Ynefel: that’s what I am.”

“Spooky to think of, m’lord, an’ odd as it is.”

“The truth,” he said, with the sudden conviction that all the world would have bent itself to achieve that one thing. He could not resist it any more than he could have resisted Mauryl’s summoning.

Mauryl’s handiwork? he asked himself. Had it always been? Or was it yet?

“Will ye go to bed?” Uwen asked meekly. “Or dare ye? If ye wish’t, I’ll watch.”

It was a draw, his concern, Uwen’s. And after such debate, and thinking on it, he found himself wearier than he had thought, and after many late nights, at last very inclined to sleep, as if he had waited for this event, and now it had happened, he could let go.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I will.”

“Ye’re sure.”

“I am sure. Good night to you. A peaceful night.”

“An’ to you, m’lord.” Uwen remained dubious. He wished Uwen a peaceful night, wished it with wizardly force, so that he hoped Uwen would sleep soundly and take no chances with such things as wandered the night.

He himself went back to bed—Orien’s bed, Heryn’s bed, he could never forget it, and the dragons loomed above him with claws outstretched and brazen wings spread.

Dreaming of Owl was better than some dreams, and better than the lack of them, for he had no imagination of the time to come, such as he understood Men had: it was his misfortune to see only time present and the recollections of his brief year thus far, but any notion of where he was going, any imagination of the year after this still appeared to him in conjectures and fragments, and he had no notion how much Men knew of their life to come.

An unwritten slate, Mauryl had called him once; and in some regards that was still so, and truths were still finding space in the blank ground.

Perilous to write on, Mauryl had said that of him, too, but many people had written their truths in his heart: Mauryl, Emuin, Cefwyn… Uwen, even, and Tassand, and Lusin and the rest. Crissand. Orien Aswydd, in her way. And Ninévrisë. It was why he gathered up Aman and Nedras, the gate-guards, and young Paisi, whose wizardry was a candleflame in a strong gale, and apt to go out if he ventured away from safe walls, or flare up in wizardous fire if he someday touched the right substance.

There was Cook, who had fed him, Haman, who had provided him an example of honest work and good management… all these men and women who had given their skills to him, now he ruled, and managed, and attempted to manage wisely and honestly.

He had stood on a hill in Guelessar not so long ago wondering what it would be to remember far back in years he did not have; and what it would be like to imagine forward from the moment of his standing on that hill.

He could not have imagined this, or ever foreseen that he would return here.

He still could not imagine with complete confidence that he would see the spring, or that the Zeide and Henas’amef would not swallow him down in its long memories.

Had not Emuin said that the Midwinter was the hinge of the year, when all things done turned again and the year began to fold back on itself? Then, if ever, did not magic have its moment, when all things swung into a new path and all things were possible?

And in mid-spring, his year of life would be complete. And would he have another? Despite Emuin’s assurances, it was never promised him. Mauryl had called him into the world in spring and by summer he had done all that Mauryl purposed… had he not?

Had he not? Or was it still shaping itself, and moving through the world?

The gray space roiled gently with Emuin’s contemplation of that question, and of him.

But Emuin said not a word to him of why all the wards of the town had flared at once.

—«♦«♦»♦»—

Interlude

—«♦«♦»♦»—

Stitch and stitch, pearls and more mounds of blue and white… since Murandys’ colors, blue, the Quinalt sigil on a white field, bend or, were very like those of Ninévrisë’s own house of Syrillas. None of the stitchers, inching their way pearl by pearl across plains and hills of satin, could miss the irony in that coincidence.

Least of all did Ninévrisë miss it. She dreamed at times of the more pleasant hours of her own preparation, and the candlelit glow of her wedding in the great, echoing Quinalt shrine.

Luriel of Murandys, applying cordings to a satin sleeve, maintained her delicate posture between affront to her former betrothed’s wife and praise of the lordly bargain she had in her current betrothed… wise, since the gentleman’s sister, Brusanne of Panys, was seated close by her, another and prior member of their small society. Luriel professed herself utterly charmed by Rusyn of Panys… had never, in fact, considered him as a suitor, but now that he put himself forward, why, he was fine and handsome and witty, he had become quite the young man, and she thought she might be falling in love… an extravagance of charity, perhaps, but a brave effort.

The peaceful meetings would have been intolerable if Luriel were a fool, but she was not, thank the gods.

Nor did Ninévrisë intend to be one. If jealousy reared itself in her heart it was not because Cefwyn had ever loved this lady—in fact she was convinced that Cefwyn had never cared for Luriel at all beyond the chivalry he had for all ladies who had ever drawn his eye. The marriage he had almost made with Luriel had been an affair of state, the same necessity Efanor now faced—and if Ninévrisë was jealous, it was jealousy that this bride of a minor noble, while she drew the inevitable darts of Bonden-on-Wyk, seemed so in command of the court … her court. That was a situation she had not foreseen, and one which she meant to remedy, but had not yet discovered how.

Stitch and stitch, and tongues flew rapid as the silver needles, la! the sins of Artisane, the ambitions of Artisane, the onetime leader of the malice in the court, were now under intimate examination. The ladies smiled to Luriel’s face, gossiped absent Artisane to her least flaw of taste and wit, and the barbs sped.

And believe that Artisane was the only subject of their talk? No. Ninévrisë was sure there were other topics… the only pillar of sober sense in the women’s court being Dame Margolis, the armorer’s lady, who would say the truth, and the honest truth, and tolerate none of the more wicked gossip.

Of course, it meant when Margolis was in attendance one learned less, too… and by now the rumor of a royal message to Ryssand had broken in various houses, with a clamor that was worth hearing… if not for Margolis’ presence. All the court was sure this message meant negotiation and reconciliation with the king.

And that meant all alliances, some newly formed and unprecedented, were now to reconsider.

Might Ryssand return, and in some chastened new connection to the throne? Might Ryssand have found a means to come back intact, and, la! what might Artisane do, having thus affronted the Royal Consort? Would there be redemption? A nunnery, perhaps? There were shudders at that, for none of these young women fancied the contemplative life, bereft of festivals and dancing … Quinalt that they were, there was not a one who could say what she thought by reason of her philosophy, only by rote learning of what she must avoid.

Curious, Ninévrisë thought, making small, neat stitches on her rival’s hem. Curious that the soul and sense of all these Quinalt maidens’ morality was not to be seen to love. La! it might be witchcraft that the king had given his bride an acorn as countryfolk did, and witchcraft and wizardry were what the Bryaltines did, oh, and did anyone mark how the Bryalt father ran his fingers round the rim of his wine cup at the feast?

Her maid had told her that yesterday, since the ladies had not remarked the maid’s presence before they began to talk. In anyone else that gesture with the cup was insignificant: but in Father Benwyn’s case, oh, certainly a strange Bryalt practice, warding his cup from poisons, and, la! who would poison the Bryalt father, who truly was an inoffensive sort… though a heretic, of course. Or nearly so.

So her maid, Fiselle, a girl of good sense, had reported to her.

So the days drew on, pearl by pearl, stitch by stitch. She smiled at Luriel every day, and saw troops and bridges to Elwynor. Every night was love, unthought and measureless, a warmth of candlelight and a lover’s passionate embrace. They were mad things, she and Cefwyn. They burrowed beneath blankets and invented their own kingdom to explore. Then everything was wonderful.

But every sun came up on the world and measured it with a cold, wintry eye. She had headaches, and craved raspberries, which could not be had, and did not confess the desire, but measured herself in her mirror and wondered, desperately, to what wild chance of fate she had committed herself.

Every day her people died and still the needles flew, seeding pearls and schemes in a world of virgins and matrons. Efanor courted Artisane, Cefwyn redeemed Murandys, and rebuilt the walls of his kingdom.

I bear you no ill will, Ninévrisë had said to Luriel, early in their meeting, in their one conversation on the matter of old loves.

“Your Grace is generous,” Luriel had said, “beyond all women.” And then Luriel had added, in that deadly honesty that partook a little of contempt, “I could not be, were I in your place.”

It warned her, then and from the start, that neither generosity nor love had made it possible for them to sit side by side. It was that they both were set on separate campaigns, both desperate, both under the weight of censure, both willing to endure any other affront to secure what they wished… and their wishes were not mutually exclusive. On that slender point, peace rested.

She had not retorted, Because you cannot be generous, you are not in my place… although that was what she thought. Luriel had stinted Cefwyn of her love, her troth, her loyalty, and Cefwyn, not being a fool, had never given her his. Cefwyn could not love this woman, and the closer he had grown to Luriel the more he had known it.

Ninévrisë had thought that, too, on that occasion, and had not said it.

But she had taken that conversation for her one moment to tell some truth to Luriel of Murandys. “What I do,” she had said, “I do for my husband’s sake. Never mistake my tolerance for folly.” And having said that, she never placed her trust in Luriel.

Stitch and stitch. In the patterns one could lose oneself. In the making of stitches, small and precise, there was no tomorrow and no yesterday, only the need to count threads and remember. The prattle of schemes and suppositions was only idle noise. Outside, the weather spat, and drizzled, then burned bright blue and icy cold. Cravings for raspberries turned to dishes of custard, which she had had as a child, and could not well describe to the cook, though her tongue remembered the taste exquisitely. Custard after custard failed her expectation.

“Did you hear?” Odrinian came in saying, one morning. “Someone painted the Quinalt sigil on the street outside Father Benwyn’s door last night.”

“Did they?” asked Bonden-on-Wyk.

“Benwyn will lay a curse on them,” Odrinian said.

“If he sobers enough,” said Brusanne.

Ninévrisë had said nothing in this exchange. Glances drifted toward her like moths to the forbidden fire, and hers to them. Needles stilled. There was the least hint of fear.

“He’s not a wizard,” Ninévrisë found herself saying. “No such thing. That’s not right.”

The silence lasted a moment. They never asked her what it was to be Bryaltine, and in fact she failed to practice the faith in any nightly observances. Benwyn did, nightly visiting the shrine, and having his wine flask with him… but most times being sober, since Idrys had lectured Benwyn very sternly.

He made fine salves, did Benwyn of Amefel. Bonden-on-Wyk used them. Her feet and hands pained her, and she swore Benwyn had given her more relief than the Quinalt with their charms and herbal baths. But Bonden-on-Wyk did not speak up on Benwyn’s behalf now. Only Margolis said, “Well, painting the sigil on streets is no great respect of the Quinalt, either, is it?”

“No,” said Ninévrisë, gratefully, “it is not.”

Tristen had acted recklessly: Cefwyn’s letters advised him so; and so did Idrys, which she hoped Tristen would heed, but one was never sure with him. News of the schism in the Quinalt frightened her. So much was fragile. Elwynor itself had become fragile, poised on the edge of starvation and dissolution. The prophecy of the King To Come might well be fulfilled in Tristen… she saw the signs, and for that she was also afraid… a selfish fear, she had thought at first; but more and more she knew that there was more than need of Guelessar that had turned Cefwyn from crossing the river last summer’s end. That he might fulfill the prophecy was something they shared, and then she had been swept by doubts, one time desiring to be queen and not a stranger in Guelessar, one time asking herself dared she stand in the way of prophecy and was she so great a fool?

But now when she heard the women talk of attacks on her priest she knew another fear, for nowhere in the prophecy of the King To Come did it promise miracles or even salvation for Elwynor. The King To Come was the High King, the King at Althalen… and Elwynor only a province in his hands, nothing said of its safety or its fate when all was done.

She spoke for Elwynor itself. She secretly nursed a hope within her, as yet untested.

Meanwhile Efanor courted Artisane, sending her letters and gifts, and Ryssand remained unprecedentedly quiet, while she knew the Holy Father of the Quinalt pursued debates with priests Ryssand sponsored.

All these things, all these things, troubled her thoughts when her hands fell idle.

Her heart and her hopes, had soared when she heard that Elwynim, her Elwynim, had found safety with Tristen, but oh, there were dangers still. Spring, spring would bring their answers; and in the meanwhile events proved that in Tristen’s hands the prophecy was a dangerous thing, much as she loved him for his innocence and his devotion to Cefwyn.

Now the angers pressed in on her, angers she would have been free to satisfy if they had crossed the river this summer and engaged all of Elwynor without warning.

And at such moments she wondered if it had not been unwise ever to have entangled herself with the Bryaltines instead of the Teranthines, difficult as that had seemed. Benwyn, poor man, had no understanding of the currents that swirled about him. Angry Guelenfolk painted signs at his door. They gossiped about him.

The rare times she had ever talked with the man, it was not philosophy or religion, but herb lore out of Elwynor, and the obscure history of the shrine in Amefel. The sad truth was Benwyn well knew he was hated, and drank when he must face roomfuls of good Quinaltines.

Consequently he drank often… not the wisest solution, but then, if Benwyn had been wise, he would have confined his ministry to Amefel and not been the only Bryalt priest in Guelessar.

While she, if she were wise, would have bowed her head and accepted the Teranthine compromise, and never accepted this priest, near as he was to her father’s observances. She saw now what a difficulty it was to force Ylesuin and Elwynor into union, and she knew that if there could not be a peaceful compromise of the Guelen clergy, Ylesuin itself might be rent apart. As might she.

“It’s shameful,” Ninévrisë said now, regarding this latest outrage. “It’s shameful to use the Quinalt that way, and it’s shameful to treat poor Benwyn that way.”

For the Crown itself could not, dared not defend Benwyn too zealously. She knew how delicate a balance that was.

“Oh, dear,” said Brusanne, and began that urgent search of her skirts that told of a lost needle. Others began to search, too, about her, through the mountains of fabric around her, for the needles that sewed the pearls were fine and easily lost, and tended to turn up in the folds of the work, to prick the wearer when she next tried the garment on.

“Here it is,” said Margolis, and returned it to the daughter of Panys, who thrust it through the sleeve above her wrist.

“There,” said Brusanne. “I’ll not stab my brother’s bride. I’m sure it’s bad luck.”

“It’s bad luck to say bad luck,” said Bonden-on-Wyk.

“There,” said Luriel, vexed. “Will you not refrain from saying it twice, then?”