Fortress in the Eye of Time

CHAPTER 9

The assizes were done, the evening headache, promoted by a boundary dispute and a squabbling lot of voices, had given way to a pleasant warmth of wine, and a wind from the west stirred the air from the open window-panels above a candlelit tumble in the silken sheets. Orien and Tarien were a red-haired bedful, a welcome diversion on this night when Cefwyn felt the need to forget the dayʼs necessities. Together the twins had the wit of half the council combined, a more astute judgment, a keener humor; and their perfumed oil, Orienʼs hands and Tarienʼs lips were a potent, delirious persuasion to think of nothing else at all and hold himself as long as he could manage—

Which he could do, thinking of the water rights of Assurn-brook and two border lords at each otherʼs throats. He could distract himself quite effectively for perhaps a breath or two, asking himself whether bribery, diversion, or main force was the appropriate answer to fools — a mandated marriage, perhaps: Esryddʼs light-of-wit son, the thane of Assurn-Hawasyr, and Durellʼs plump wayward daughter, both with ambitions, both lascivious, both—

Was it through the female line the lands of Payny could descend? The earlʼs daughter by a second wife…that could pose a problem.

The intricacies of Amefin titles were another source of headache, the thane of this and the earl of that, and the province of Amefel as a whole ruled over by the Aswydds, ducal in the Guelen court at Guelemara in Guelessar, and styling themselves aethelings, though discreetly, in their own provincial and very luxurious court…

“Gods,” he moaned, the vixen proving she had teeth. The other threatened Tarien with the pillow, and he took the game for what it was, rolled Tarien under and suffered a buffeting of feathers and a flank attack, Orien complaining she was slighted. Or was it, after all, Tarien?

He let himself be wrestled onto his back, and a furious battle ensued between the twins, in which he was the disputed territory, and in which he had an enchanting view of both well-bred ladies, before they smothered him in unison, and not with pillows.

He was taking random choice, then, perilous decision, when came one thump at the inner door, and a second.

And a third. Which roused his temper, which defeated other processes in midcourse, and left him utterly confused between the twins, who wanted him to continue, and his door, at which some fool continued a hammering assault.

“Gods damn you!” he cried, flat on the battlefield, overwhelmed and unhorsed. “Gods damn your knocking and battering, what do you want thatʼs worth your neck?”

“Mʼlord,” came from the other side of the doors. “Forgive me…”

“Not damned likely!”

“…but thereʼs a stranger in hall. Master Emuin said you should hear this.”

“Master Emuin has no natural impulses,” he muttered, and drew a pillow over his face, momentary refuge. “Master Emuin has no—”

Thump. “My lord?”

He groaned and tossed the pillow aside. Orien — or was it Tarien? — kissed him on the mouth and clung to his arm. Her twin tossed a wealth of red-gold hair over a sullen shoulder and gathered the wine-stained sheet about her, rising.

He rolled to the doorward end of the bed, sighed as his feet found the fleece rug, searched blindly down the bed for remnants of his clothing.

“My lord?”

“Idrys,” he said to the batterer, “—Idrys, damn you, go down, tell them Iʼm aware, awake, bothered, duly alarmed, and duty-bound, I shall be there in a gods-cursed moment — I can dress myself, I learned at my lady motherʼs knee, curse you all—”

Orien cried out as he snatched her by the wrist, squealed as he fell atop her and recovered his moment, at least enough to serve.

After which…after which: “Iʼm duty-bound,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

“Perhaps,” said Orien — he believed it was Orien. Lord Herynʼs sisters did as they pleased, and she would please herself again, or Tarien would, or both together. They played pranks on their lovers, which were more numerous than Heryn Aswydd accounted of…but not many more, one could guess. Their lord brother, His Grace the Duke of Amefel, aetheling of the Amefin, was much about the court himself, in and out of this bed and that, trading gossip in every profitable ear.

One talked no affairs of state with the twins, who never asked gifts — least of all from him, whose acceptance they courted, oh, so gladly, since Lurielʼs abrupt departure from the court…but wager that this untimely knocking would clatter straight to Herynʼs ear for whatever value it had.

Emuin, about at this hour. A stranger, with some matter of import, enough to bring the old man from his bed.

Idrys, moved to rattle his doors to have him to some meeting.

Business with a stranger smelled of assassins, aimed at him or aimed at someone who wished to point a finger. Conspiracy was constant in this gods-cursed and often rebel district, and it could well wait until morning — late morning. Or three mornings hence for what he cared tonight. The headache was recurring.

He pulled on his hose, struggled, servantless, with the boots, and found the shirt…not overly rumpled. The doublet — no. He damned such formalities. He wore the shirttail out, splashed cold rose-scented water into his face, groped after the towel and blotted his beard and eyebrows dry — a cursory brushing of his hair, then, an apology to a braiding on his way out of the bedroom and to the door — the hell with it, he decided, and left the bedroom for the foyer doors.

A clash of arms resounded as, passing through the foyer, he left his apartment, four guards relieved at least of their nighttime boredom and mandated to endless discretion. The senior two went with him without asking. The junior and less privileged pair, with a second noisy salute, settled back to night-watch over his rooms as he went toward the east stairs.

The twins would dress and find their way out, and his guards would ignore their departure as they ignored their presence.

Such tedious games they played, when it involved dynasty, and heir-getting, Amefin ladies, and the Marhanen princeʼs bed.

Avoiding gossip. Avoiding…public acknowledgment of a known situation.

Down the hall he went with his guard about him, boots resounding on marble, and down the broad white stairs, on which the Guelen staff, instigated by his majordomo, made profligate expenditure of candles (your father the King, they began, when he protested the cost).

His father the King, in the capital at Guelemara, a province away, in the heart of the realm of Ylesuin, had an extravagant fear of the dark. And of assassins.

Entirely justified, as it happened, by Grandfatherʼs example. Hence the guards. But it had not been for want of candles that Grandfather had died.

Clatter and rattle down the steps behind him: his bodyguard, ready to defend the Prince of Ylesuin from axe-wielding priests and jealous lovers.

Himself, he dreaded only the dank, after-midnight chill of the marble halls, undiminished by the candles. He walked, followed by clatter and clank, toward the open doors, the gathering of guards, the fuss and bother of wakened staff in the lower halls. A page overtook him, clearly wakened from sleep, having brought his cloak, which in summer and after the heat of his exertions he could well have done without, but the cloak was there, the air was always cooler in the audience hall than elsewhere, and he slung it on, freed his hair from it, encountered Emuin just inside the doors, along with a clot of night-staff and guards.

“This had better be worth it,” he muttered to Emuin, whose habit, in former years common cloth and perpetually inkstained, now was the immaculate gray of the Teranthine order — although within the court he wielded secular power his monastic and meditative order abhorred.

“I assure Your Highness…” Emuin began, but he brushed past, sleepy, by now, and not in any good humor.

“My lord Prince—”

His captain of the guard, Idrys, slipped up to him like a pike to a passing morsel, a black pike, wily, and veteran of hooks. Cefwyn waved a hand, a limp, circular signal that said to Idrys what he had just said to Emuin, in less polite terms, and stalked up the dais steps to the gilt, antique and unwarrantably uncomfortable throne, on which he disposed himself in no formality. He hooked a knee over the arm, heaved a sigh, and blinked, bleary-eyed, at the scatter of political expediencies that cluttered this midnight audience. He could list agencies that might be behind this undoubted ploy to obtain the unaware, uninformed state in which he found himself. Certain courtiers would have the stomach to play these games, such courtiers as aimed for his ear, his table, his bed, such noble families of the Guelenfolk from the capital as constantly plied their politics in this chamber; such of the Amefin locals as lurked in the aisles on feast days to catch his attention, hand him a petition — offer him an assignation with their sisters.

Little difference, one from the next, except he mortally loathed the ones that arrived after midnight, determined to have his ear privily and at unusual length regarding some piece of skullduggery gone awry before the other side of the business, no more nor less at fault, could counter it with appearances and protestations of their own.

Emuin. With Idrys. One did hope for consideration from oneʼs intimates, at least. And was disappointed.

One did expect, being roused at this ungodly hour by those same intimates, at least something of spectacle, an Elwynim assassin, a clutch of lordly conspirators…a ravished and indignant lady of high degree.

And what was there? A dark-haired and dirty fellow in the ruins of good clothing restrained by two of the Guelen guard, a desperate case, to be sure, but hardly worth two armored men.

Tall for any Elwynim. Lanfarnesseman, perhaps; many were tall and slender, although most were as fair as the Guelenfolk and very few Lanfarnessemen went beardless. The prisoner stared consistently at his feet and one could not be otherwise certain of the features, but the bare, well-muscled forearms and the slender hands, alike the face, said young; and youthfulness said maybe fool enough — counting nine skulls of would-be assassins bleached and raven-picked on the Zeideʼs south gate, in his year-long tenure here — to carry some personal pique against him, for hire or for, gods save them, the ancestral Amefin grudge.

He truly hoped not to have that old business begin again.

“So what have we?” he asked, swinging his foot in deliberate contempt of amateur intrigues. “A stolen mule? A pig-napper? And two of you to restrain him? Good gods.”

“Highness,” Idrys said. “This were best heard in private.”

“Well, well, my bed chamber was private, at least, the while. Morning would not do for this? Nothing would serve but I come down myself, over cold floors and colder—”

“Highness,” Emuin chided him, his tutorial voice.

Cefwyn waved his hand. “Have your play, then. Proceed.” The hall was emptying of servants and of the curious, a last few lingering near the door; but scribes, the borderland of needful elements of the court, and occasionally discreet, stayed. “Out,” he ordered the lingerers. “No record of this. Back to your beds. Shut the doors.”

The doors shut. He swung his foot, and frowned at the prisoner, who still studied the marble steps in front of him. “So what have we?” he addressed said prisoner, but it was unproductive of answers.

Idrys came to him and offered him a small book, a codex, leather-bound, old, the worse for wear. He flipped the pages open at random, saw a blockish, antique hand, a forgotten — perhaps wizardly — language.

His heart skipped a beat — a little skip, true, and he would not betray the fact, nor mend his posture, no, not for this, which he began to suspect as some priestly game with him. He did not think it was Emuinʼs doing. It had the smell of a priestly matter, illicit and heretical practice, meaning the Bryalt faith, dominant in this province, could again be afoul of the orthodox Quinaltines, who had probably come a long and dusty ride from the capital to urge some obscure point of theology and rant to the Prince about cults and conspiracies on the borders.

But that it came through Emuin set it above the inconsequential and the purely theological.

He shut the book, left it idly in his lap, and cast a narrow look at his old tutor. “Well, old master. I take it the pig-thief came bearing this. And of course I must be roused out most urgently.”

“He claims it as his, Highness.”

Not likely his, Cefwyn thought, the youth being a youth, and lacking in every sense the plausibility of the occasional graybeard who gulled the villagers and roused — if merely for a season — Amefin expectations and Amefin disaffections from the Crown.

He considered Aman and Nedras, the gate-guards who were the anomaly in this gathering of court and guards — not the restrainers of the culprit, but those whose part in this doubtless intrigue-ridden malfeasance he had yet to hear. They were the ones who had brought with them, as he supposed, this head-hanging, straw-bedecked youth, the unwilling center of all this commotion. He would have thought, absent the gate-guards in the affair, that the Quinalt and the Teranthines were at odds over some point of abstract logic — but, gods, he had thought better of Emuin than to wake him for some priestly rivalry; and the matter did look to be some arrival at the Zeide gate.

“Man,” he said, curiosity aroused, “pig-thief. Look up. Look up here. Whose book is this?”

The prisoner had been considerably knocked about. He seemed to need the guardsʼ holding him on his feet, and needed a shake from Aman to have his attention.

That brought his head up, jolted him to alertness…and for a moment in Cefwynʼs awareness there was nothing — nothing — but that pale gaze.

Fear, Cefwyn thought, heart racing in his breast, his sense derived of judicial experience reasserting reason. It was fear he saw in most faces that came before him under such compulsion; far rarer, however, was the courage to look him in the eyes; and, he was ready to swear, although he had never met it in this court…

He saw innocence. Absolute, stark, terrifying innocence.

He had moved without thinking — had dropped his knee off the arm without knowing it; had held his next breath and feared the whole assembly in the hall had seen, did see. He was not accustomed to be so moved by anyone, and he was vexed with himself. He felt no threat in the stare, only an uncanny, helpless attraction toward this creature, an attraction all but physical, unprecedented, and intimate, so acute that he felt exposed in that motion of his heart. He had never been so set aback in his life; and he was afraid, as this creature seemed afraid, this…youth, this…man, this…

He had no way to name what he felt or what he saw; he had no reckoning even how much time had passed in the creatureʼs looking up, and shaking back his loose and tangled hair, and meeting him stare for stare.

But he knew that the men who held him were no restraint at all, if this bedraggled, fragile, glorious creature should decide to contest them.

Did no one but him see it? Did not Emuin, who was reputed wise in such matters, know that this threatening youth was not in any sense held by the guards? They had beaten him. There was straw in his dark hair and dirt on his clothes. If his guards had no terror of him, they were fools.

But maybe they had after all felt afraid — had they not, clearly, exhausted their chain of command?

And had those superior to them not called others, until the affair of the prisoner racketed to Emuin?

And had not Emuin insisted, through Idrys, that His Highness needed to be dragged from bed urgently to intervene in the matter? This was not an ordinary case. In any sense.

“Come. Come here.” Cefwyn beckoned the young man closer, and the two guards brought him to the lowermost step. The young man gazed at him again, that intimate and terrifying stare — as if the young man — which he could not possibly do — knew secrets that would damn his soul. The impression was so strong that almost he would have disposed the guards from the hall for fear of the youth speaking too much, or bringing some business worth lives — and he did not even know he owned such dreadful secrets. He found no reason for such a fear; and the youth, besides, seemed weak and uncertain on his feet, apt at moments even to fall to the marble floor without the guardsʼ steadying hold.

A moment while his thoughts raced, that silence continued in the room, until one could all but hear the snap of candle flames, until the melting of wax — like the melting of flesh just now in chambers above — made the air cloying sweet. It was Orienʼs perfume. It clung to him. His thoughts scurried like mice, this way and that, desperate, looking for an approach to the problem — and found it under his fingertips.

“Is this your book?” Cefwyn asked, lifting it from his lap.

“Yes, sir.”

“And are you indeed a thief?”

“No, sir. I am not.”

“Where were you and what were you doing, to be arrested by my guards?”

“I was at the gate. I asked to see the master.”

The Guelen guards were unhappy with that. They shook him and cuffed him, saying, “Mind your manners, man. Say, ‘yes, Your Highnessʼ and ‘no, Your Highnessʼ, and ‘Your Highness, if you pleaseʼ.”

Cefwyn winced, almost protested — but Aman, of the guard, added: “ʼEʼs a wee bit daft, Your Highness. We had a notion he might be some Elwynim wiʼ that writing, if ye know, Your Highness, him and his clothes and his speech and all, and his being a stranger.”

“Who brought him in?” Cefwyn asked, and had a confused and apologetic muttering from an officer of the gate-guards, and an avowal from Idrys himself, to which he waved a negligent hand: he knew the chain of command, and by now so did the young man — too well, he was sure.

“And you think him Elwynim? Walking in by daylight, in those clothes?”

“Your Highness, he flew right by the town guards, like their eyes was blinded, Your Highness, and them good men. He said he had old Mauryl for his master. He says he come down the road out of Marna, right from the cursed tower.”

His heart skipped a beat, but it was only confirmation. He knew now that there was omen and worse in the young man. He had seen it in the book. He had been certain of it with never a breath of a name. And to judge by Emuinʼs urging to come intervene in this matter — Emuin also had opinions, and fears to disturb his sleep, he could rely on that, too.

“From the old keep,” Cefwyn said, with the gooseflesh prickling on his arms, and a sense of peril and moment now to every move he made — not acute, not inescapable, but there. The young man was looking at him, and he avoided those eyes with a glance at his captain of the guard. “And them knocking the man about. Hardly prudent. One might make him angry.”

“This is not a jesting matter, my lord Prince.”

And Emuin, unbidden: “Ask him his business, my lord Prince. He asked for you.”

That was not news he wished to hear. He rested his chin on his hand, assumed a stony indifference and slid a glance at the youth, trying — trying to see flaws and faults in that countenance, in that overwhelming force of the youthʼs expectations.

That was what it was: expectation. Unmitigated. Unquestioning.

Faith. Appalling, utter faith, directed at him, in the godsʼ mercy, who was not accustomed to such impositions.

“So. And what is your name, young stranger in my lands? And what are you to rouse me out of my well-earned bed at this midnight hour?”

“My name is Tristen, sir.”

“No other name?”

“None that I know, sir.”

“And do you live most times at Ynefel, or do you travel about the land, rattling gates and conversing with honest guards?”

Incomprehension grew, and fear became foremost in the youthʼs eyes. “I did live there, sir. But the wind came, and the roof slates fell, and Mauryl—” The youthʼs voice faded altogether, not into tears, although the young man was distraught — simply into bewildered silence.

“So how does Mauryl fare?” Cefwyn asked him.

“I fear — he is not well.”

“And the roof slates fell,” Cefwyn echoed him.

“Yes, sir. They did. Not all. But—”

“Because of the wind, they fell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what brought you here to my hall?”

“I wish a place to sleep, sir. And supper.”

There was anxious laughter among the guards. But the young man seemed quite, quite fragile. Childish of manner, now, and altogether overwhelmed.

Cefwyn did not laugh. “Supper,” he said. “Did you walk all that way for supper?”

“And a place to stay, sir.”

“Bringing one of Maurylʼs books.”

“I didnʼt steal the book. Mauryl gave it to me. He said I should read it.”

“Did he?” He could not find in the young manʼs face the innocence he had seen before. He might have deceived himself. It might be an Amefin-sent deception, challenging his dignity and his authority. So he challenged it in turn. “How many days did you walk from Maurylʼs tower?”

“Four. Five. Perhaps five.”

“Walking? One takes it for twice that many days. At least.”

“Days and nights, sir.”

“Days and nights.”

“I feared to sleep, sir.”

“One does doubt this,” Idrys said coldly, and a spell seemed broken — or provoked. Cefwyn felt uneasiness at what he heard, but although it seemed to him that, if his maps were true, the youthʼs account was far short of the truth — still, the youthʼs remembrance might be in question. He felt more uneasiness at the habit Idrys had of provoking a situation. He saw it building.

“He does seem unlikely simple, Your Highness,” the chief of the gate-guard said, “from time to time. Anʼ then again, he donʼt.”

“Well-acted, though,” Idrys said. “Quite well-acted, boy.”

“The book,” Emuin said, “the book.”

“Oh, the book.” Idrys waved his hand. “Iʼll have you two its like by morning. Amefin maunderings. Lyrdish poetry. Gods know. Save it for the library. Some musty priest will make sense of it.”

“I think not.”

“Monastic pantry records,” Idrys said under his breath. “Household accounts.”

“A plague on you.”

“Enough,” Cefwyn said, watching the youth instead, whose glances traveled from one disputant to the other.

A Road there was indeed in Marna Wood, and legend held that no matter where one found that Road, it went to Ynefel, and not easily away again.

And by his speech, by his manner, by that unreadable book in his possession—

Had Mauryl had a servant? Cefwyn asked himself.

Or, gods save them, an apprentice?

— Or — worse still, a successor?

Not even the Amefin locals, with the old Sihhë blood still, however thin, in their veins, would readily venture that Road, that forest, far less go asking admittance at Ynefelʼs ancient gate. If an apprentice, surely no ordinary lad had come asking for the honor. But reputedly the old wizard had stirred forth, from time to time, though not to court, and reputedly the old wizard still dealt with those willing to risk the river — if indeed it was, as some credulous maintained, the same Mauryl who had dealt with his grandfather, still dealing in Sihhë gold and wizardly simples, and having Olmern lads bringing baskets of flour and oil and such like goods as far up that river as they dared go.

And never would Olmernmen cheat the old man, or short a measure. In truth — so his spiesʼ reports had it, they made the measures as much as possible, and tucked gifts in as well.

So the Olmernmen, particularly those of the village of Capayneth, still honored the Nineteen, the wizardsʼ gods, as did the rural folk of Amefel, — while the local Quinalt priests, for a share of the gold, looked the other way. As a deity, Mauryl had been demonstrably efficacious for centuries — at least, skeptics said, the many who had had the name of Mauryl and occupied the tower since the legendary rise of the Sihhë kings. More, on the medicines and spells the old man sold, Capaynethʼs sheep bore twins, Capaynethʼs women never miscarried, Capaynethʼs crops somehow never quite headed-out and dried before hail that flattened other fields, and Capaynethʼs folk lived long and healthy lives. So they said.

And mutter as the Quinalt would, it could not prevent the veneration that outlasted the Sihhë themselves.

Mauryl fallen? The sun had as well come up in the west. Comets should fill the heavens.

The youthʼs acute attention had flagged now. The youthʼs head had drooped under his study as if bearing himself on his feet was all that he could do. If this lad was local deity, heir to immortal Mauryl, he bore the wrong name and showed himself a mortal and weary godling, smudged with mud and traces of blood, wilting before his eyes. The spark that had leapt out of the youth for that moment seemed utterly irrecoverable now, the force all fled, — for which the Prince of Ylesuin could be grateful. Here was only a tired young man with an unkept look and a convincing innocence at least of pig-theft, wife-beating, and petty banditry.

“Tristen.”

“Sir?” The head came up, the eyes met his, and that moment was indeed almost back, that intense, that unbearable innocence — so appalling and so unprecedented that a man was drawn to keep looking, wishing to be sure, from heartbeat to heartbeat, that it was truly there or had ever been there.

But he could not find it again, not with the same force. Perhaps the young man did have secrets. Perhaps the young man had discovered them in himself, and was not quite so innocent.

Or perhaps he had found that his hosts were not what he had hoped.

“Aman.”

“Your Highness?”

“This young man is not to be harmed in any way. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Highness.” There was true commitment in that answer. Aman knew when the Prince of Ylesuin was completely serious, and when default would entrain sure consequences.

“Idrys. The west wing, the blue room.”

“My lord Prince,—”

“Idrys. The west wing. The blue room.”

“Yes, my lord Prince.”

“Tristen.”

“My lord?”

A change. An awakening to proprieties. A wit wakening — or a pretense abandoned. It could betoken lies. Or utter ignorance. Cefwyn did not so much as blink. “Tristen, these several honest men will take you to a room, and servants there will provide you whatever you reasonably need. Your requests will be moderate, I trust…”

“Supper?”

“Assuredly.” One did not interrupt the Prince of Ylesuin when he was speaking. There were breaths bated. Not his. He became imperturbable. And equally plain-spoken. “I also suggest hot water.” The young man looked to have been accustomed to cleanliness — and if he had himself walked five days and five nights through the woods, as the youth had claimed to have done, a bath would have ranked foremost among his requests.

“I would be very grateful, my lord.”

Ah. Politeness. Courtly politeness. And a moment, all unanticipated, to set the hook.

“These things,” Cefwyn said, “if you will answer a question.”

“Sir?” Back to the first mistakes of protocol, in such an audience. And in an eyeblink, the young manʼs self-possession began to fray about the edges. In vain, perhaps, the guardsʼ knocking-about: threats of harm had not shaken the youthʼs composure or come near the truth. But now, in the diminishing of threats, the offering of comfort — then the abrupt withholding of it — the young manʼs voice trembled.

Not a chance tactic. Nor kind. No more kind than a prince could afford to seem, in getting at the facts of a case.

“A simple question, Tristen. An easy question.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Who sent you?”

“Mauryl, sir.”

“Is that the truth I am to believe?”

A hesitation. A careful, apparently earnest, rethinking. “No, sir.”

“What is true, then?”

“Mauryl said to follow the Road.”

“And?”

“Nothing more, sir. Only to follow the Road. I thought—”

“Go on, Tristen with no name. You thought—”

“Thought, since the Road came here, through the gate, that this must be the place he meant me to be.”

Maurylʼs student. Possibly. The young man could dice his reasons quite, quite finely, point by point, and say what he chose to say. A common villager did not do that. It came of courtly records. Priestly teaching.

And a prince could parse reasons down the list — I, thou, he, whence, why, and to what end — quite, quite well on his own.

“And for what purpose, Tristen of no name, did Mauryl Gestaurien send you — ah! — bid you to take to the Road?”

“He never told me that.”

“Did he say — go left or go right?”

“No, sir. It only — seemed — as the gate showed me.”

“And Mauryl is not well, at the moment.”

“No, sir.”

“In what way is he not well?”

“He—” Clearly they had reached an abrupt precipice of reason. Or a brutal wall of understanding. “I — saw his face above the door. In the wall, my lord. Like — like the other faces.”

From an improper ‘sirʼ to a presumptuous ‘my lord.ʼ And on such a chilling declaration. There was consternation at various points about the hall. He hoped there was none from him — he tried at least to maintain calm. The matter of the faces was well-rumored, the work of the last Galasieni — or the succession of Mauryls all hight Gestaurien: accounts varied, none of which he had taken as truth, and he would not be daunted, not by the claim, not by the innocence in the voice.

“Like the other faces. Most remarkable. Or not, in that venue. Do casual strangers inhabit the walls? Or only outworn wizards?”

“I — have no idea, sir.”

“Are you a wizard yourself?”

“No, sir.”

“What are you, then? Beggar, servant, — priest of unwholesome gods?”

“No, sir.” The gray gaze was frightened, now, as if this Tristen were well aware of mockery and yet had no means to discern wherein he was mocked.

“Come,” Cefwyn said, “even the score, sir wayfarer. Ask a question of me.”

“Are you the master of this place?”

“Yes,” he said, as plainly as the youth asked, and ignoring the ducking of heads and hiding of expressions all about the hall, stood fast in this assault of the wizardous and incredible. “I am. Cefwyn. Prince of Ylesuin, for that matter, but, yes, master of this hall, this town, this province. — And if I give you welcome, you are indeed welcome, Tristen late from Ynefel. — Mauryl indisposed. Immured. This is astounding, even momentous news. Is there perchance more you should tell me?”

“I fear,” the youth said faintly, “I fear that Mauryl is lost. I think he would come back if he could. But heʼs in the wall.”

“What of the rest of Maurylʼs books?” Emuin asked. Like a pebble in a still pond, that deftly-dropped wizardly concupiscence. Emuin was likewise refusing to be daunted. And the young manʼs eyes were at once wary and alarmed.

“I suppose inside, sir. Everything was falling. I sat on the step outside. I feared to go back inside. When it grew dark — I went to the Road.”

“I wager you did wisely,” Cefwyn said, keeping his voice quite sincere. “Mauryl was our neighbor for many years, vastly preceding my tenure here. Or my fatherʼs or my grandfatherʼs, for that matter. He kept his own borders and stayed out of mine. One can hardly ask for more in a neighbor of long standing. — Idrys, perhaps instead of the blue room, which is doubtless musty — is the gray hall in good order for a guest?”

He himself doubted that was the case, but it signaled to Idrys the quality of hospitality he meant. “Cedrigʼs chamber,” Idrys suggested, “is far airier, Highness.”

Meaning to Idrysʼ knowledge it was clean, unoccupied, — and might have advantages as far as the guard being able to keep a close eye on things, being upstairs and at the end of a cul de sac hallway. That would far better satisfy Idrysʼ concerns — which were certainly not to ignore.

“See to it,” Cefwyn said lightly and, keenly aware Emuin wished the young man disposed otherwise, and that Emuin wished his own hands on the book, held out the book to their guest. The guards — simple men but no dullards — let him go then, and the young man set an intemperate foot on the second and the third step. Cefwyn held the offered book so he must ascend to claim it, not leaning forward to give it. It was a trap, and even as the youth laid hand to the book, Cefwyn did not let the book go, wishing the young man face to face and in privy conference with him.

“Did Gestaurien teach you his arts?” he asked in a low voice, not for other ears. He looked at close range at the prisoner, at the reality of grimed skin and tangled hair and those eyes that had no barriers in them. “The truth, Tristen from Ynefel, as you wish my hospitality. Are you a wizard?”

“No, sir.”

“And what is in this book?”

“He said I should read it. I make some sense of the letters, but I donʼt know the words. — Can you read it, sir?”

Trapper became trapped — in an earnestness, an expectation he had never met in anyone.

“A few words.” He by no means could do even that. “Surely Emuin knows more. — Perhaps he would teach you — if you asked.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“What did Emuin say to you regarding it?”

“He said I shouldnʼt answer the guardsʼ questions any longer. He said I should come with him, and he would see you took care of me.”

“Did he?” He cast a look toward Emuin, standing, hands folded in his sleeves and looking like the fabled cat in the creamery. “And why would I take care of you?”

“I suppose because youʼre master here, sir.”

“If he said so, why, of course it must bind me, must it not, master Emuin? — Believe him, young traveler. Like Idrys, there, do you see? Idrys is a very grim fellow — a very dangerous fellow. But if he likes you well, and if I say so, nothing will ever come close to you in this hall that would harm you, do you follow me?”

Tristen looked briefly askance at Idrys, and seemed not in the least reassured. “Yes, sir.”

“I promise you.” He let go the book into Tristenʼs keeping, locked his hands across his lap. “Idrys, take our guest upstairs. — Aman, thank you, and thank your captain for the astuteness at last to call Emuin. Good night, gods attend, back to your posts, all. — And, Emuin,…”

Emuin was, ghostlike, halfway past the door he had not ordered opened. Emuin stopped still, and ebbed silently back into the audience chamber while Idrys took their guest and the guards away out the selfsame door and out of his immediate concern.

“I take it,” Cefwyn said as the door was shutting again, leaving himself and Emuin alone, “you do read somewhat of the book in question.”

“I say we should go riding tomorrow.”

Not to discuss within walls, Emuin meant.

“Not a word tonight, old master?”

“Not on this.”

“A caution?”

Emuin walked from the door to the dais and stopped, arms folded. “In specific? You are in danger.”

“From him?” He sprawled backward, legs apart, the calculated image of his student, sullen self. “Master Emuin, surely you jest.”

“I swore, no more students. Iʼll not have you acting the part. Gods, you affront me!”

“I affront you, good sir. Whence this midnight call, with no counsel, and now my decisions affront you? Now we have dire secrets? I am not fond of being led.” He thumped one booted ankle onto the other. “I am not fond of being hastened into conclusions, nor of having advice presented me on the trembling, crumbling verge of decision, nor of being a pawn of othersʼ ambitions, which—” An uplifted finger, forestalling objection. “—of course the Teranthine Brotherhood does not possibly have, nor you within the brotherhood, nor Idrys toward me, nor, gods know, the captain of the night-guard, whatsoever, toward anyone. So I confess myself entirely nonplussed, master Emuin. Why the book, why the secrecy, why this midnight alarum out of the hearing of my more slugabed courtiers?”

“Ah, is that why you were so prodigal of your hospitality? To confound me? — I had rather thought it a glamor on the young man.”

It stung, that Emuin had seen that moment for what it was.

It warned him that others might have seen him bemazed.

And it made him ask himself what he had felt — still felt, when he thought about it: an affinity of the soul for an utter stranger, a young man linked, moreover, to a wizard of dubious repute and legendary antiquity. For a moment in that audience he had felt as though some misstep might take their visitor away from him, and felt as though, if he should by that chance let him go, forever after he would know he had lost the one friend his fate meant him to have.

Which was foolishness. Men were, among the chattels of which the Prince of Ylesuin had usage, the most fickle and the most replaceable. Let Emuin fall utterly from favor, as sometimes, hourly, seemed imminent, and two-score applicants would rise out of the hedges by sundown seeking Emuinʼs office and bearing their princeʼs humors far more philosophically.

So he told himself — hourly. But Emuin knew him, Emuin had no fear of him, and that, while a sin in a councillor (Emuin had been that in the court at Guelemara), was a virtue in his privy counselor and a necessity in a tutor — which Emuin still was, when mʼlord Prince needed a severe lesson read.

His fortunes bound to some wizard-foundling-apprentice with feckless trust writ all over his features?

“Iʼve no need of him,” he protested to Emuin.

“Said I ever you had need of him?”

“I have need of advice, master grayfrock, from your ascetic and lofty height, doubtless superior to fornicating mortals. What is this creature, why at my doorstep, why in the middle of my night, why bearing grammaries of unreadable ill, and why in the name of the unnameable in my tenure in Amefel? He could have gone to the Elwynim. He could well have gone to the Elwynim. He may be Elwynim, for what we know — and needs must come to my gates begging supper? Damn the luck, sir tutor, if luck has anything to do with it!”

“There is no violence in him,” Emuin said. “Peace, Cefwyn. I do not yet know the cipher he is, but it would be well to treat him gently. I do much doubt he is the witless creature your men believe. Ynefel, he cried out, and Mauryl. And your guard in an access of wit roused their captain, who, after a candleʼs time lodging this boy in the prisonʼs stench and squalor, became uneasy, roused the magistrate of the hour, and so quite rapidly they came to the staff, and to Idrys, who broke my sleep, and I, after much shorter interrogation, yours. But in all this time, save a disagreement with the gate-guards, no defense did he use, neither by hand nor by word.”

“What is he?”

“My suspicion?”

“I will take your chanciest and rarest guess at this point.”

“Maurylʼs Shaping.”

Shaping was a word that belonged to dark ruins and forests…not arriving in a manʼs own downstairs hall, not standing at his feet, looking at him eye to eye.

But it did accord, he thought with a shiver, with a face without the lines that twenty-odd years of living should have set into muscle and mouth. It could become anything — as it had varied quickly between apprehensive, or bewildered — but nothing stayed there. That was the innocence that attracted him.

And chilled his blood now.

“A revenant.”

“So the accounts say: the dead are the source of souls.”

He rested his chin against his hand, feeling an unstoppable roused-from-bed chill, a quivering of his skin, as if — he knew not what he felt. It was not a terrible face. It was not a cruel face. It had been — childlike, that was his lasting impression.

“Are such things evil, master grayrobe?”

“Not in themselves.”

“Why?” His arm came down hard on the arm of the throne. He was disturbed, not alone for the realm, and for the guest under his roof; he was — personally disturbed that the visitor had that much moved him.

More than moved him. He would not sleep tonight. He knew he would not sleep easy for days after meeting that intimate stare — and hearing what Emuin claimed.

“Why?” Emuin echoed his question. “Why would Mauryl call such a thing? Or why would it come here?”

“Why both? Why either? Why to Mauryl Gestaurien and his mouse-ridden hall? What did the old man want, living there as he did, when the Elwynim would have received him? What does this thing want here? And why did you let me give it hospitality?”

“I gave you my guess, lord Prince. Not my certainty.”

“A plague on your guesses, Emuin! This is, or this is not — a man. Is it a man — or not?”

“And I say that if I knew all about that matter that Mauryl Gestaurien might know, I should be a very dangerous man myself. I merely caution. I by no means know.”

“And counseled me take him in, allow him that cursed book, set him upstairs from my own apartments—”

“At least,” said Emuin, “if he takes wing and flies about the halls you should have earliest warning.”

There was no abating it. There was no more Emuin knew for certain, or, at least, no more that Emuin was willing to say. It was time for sober, direct questions.

“What do you advise?” he asked Emuin. “All recriminations aside, what do you advise me do, since you were so forward to bring him to me?”

“Keep him here; treat him as gently born, but keep silence about him. There are things he does not need to know. There are those who do not need to know about him. Inform His Majesty of particulars if you must, but none other. None other. And put strict limit to what order Idrys gives. Idrys does not approve this guest.”

“And do what with him, pray, in the event he does begin to fly?”

Emuin looked up from under white brows in that sidelong way that cautioned, reminding an old student that the old man was no fool. “Mauryl served Ylesuin for his own reasons. And yet did he ever serve Ylesuin at all? Or why did he turn so absolutely against the Sihhë? Mauryl is the question here, still.”

Mauryl the recluse, the incorruptible; Mauryl the murderer of his own kin; Mauryl the peacekeeper on the marches of the West. Accounts varied. Nothing in Mauryl had ever been predictable.

Neither was his death, at the last, predictable, nor, one could well surmise, was Maurylʼs last gift at all predictable — if it was indeed his last and not a wellspring of further gifts of dubious benefit.

Cefwyn let his breath hiss between his teeth. “And back to my question: if he begins to fly, or to walk through walls, what in bloody and longstanding reason shall we do with him?”

Emuin bowed his head, ironic homage. “You are the ruler of this province now, young Cefwyn. You say all yeas and nays. I am here merely to assist.”

“In this I purpose, I swear, to take your advice, Emuin. What does this Shaping want here?”

“I am certain I have no idea.” Emuin brushed invisible dust off his gray robes and off his hands. “Time I should attend my devotions, my lord Prince. I grow too old for such nocturnal excitements.”

“Emuin!”

Emuin stopped at the bottom of the steps, looked back in the attitude of a father annoyed by a favored son. “Yes, my lord Prince?”

“You brought him here. I want a plain answer. What manner of thing is such a Shaping, what is he likely to do, and what are we to do with him?”

“Ah, no, no, no,” Emuin said softly. “I by no means brought him. Dismiss that notion from your calculations, my Prince. He brought himself. He has no idea what he is; nor have I; and we are safest if we do well with him.”

“Is he personally dangerous?”

“You know as much as I, my young lord.” Emuin turned his back a second time, which no sober man in the town of Henasʼamef would have dared, and ambled away, dismissing his prince as the pupil he had once been. “I am for prayers and bed. Patience will unravel this; force has had its chance. And yes, he is perhaps very dangerous, as Mauryl was very dangerous. Win his love, Cefwyn. That is, in binding dangerous things, always wisest.”

“Emuin.”

The door closed. Cefwyn swore, stamped down the steps and stalked out the echoing door through the confusion of abandoned men-at-arms, who gave way in prudent haste before his anger.

He was well up the stairs to his west wing apartment before he realized that, in the disarray of the men-at-armsʼ general instructions and posting, the guards below had not followed, Idrys was on the uppermost floor with the prisoner, and he himself was unguarded. No prince of Ylesuin walked alone or slept without steel at his threshold.

“Kerdin,” he hailed the captain below. “Attend me. Now.”

And as the man scrambled to gather up a force of guard and overtake him, he turned and stamped his way up to his floor, his hall, his rooms, where, with a clatter and martial thump, an abundance of guards changed outside his foyer. He stormed through the two sets of foyer doors, seeking the doors of his bedchamber, where a rumpled bed and a lingering musk recalled the twins.

He slammed the last doors, seeking unachievable privacy. The musk smelled as fetid as the prison-stench. He took off his cloak and his boots, stripped the bed, flung sheets this way and that in a fit of incoherent temper, and cast himself down on the bare mattress on his back, still fully clothed.

The candle was all but spent. It flared brightly for a time, then dimmed in fitful spits and spurts. Cefwyn lay with his hands locked behind his head and his eyes fixed on the painted ceiling, his heart still beating for combat, not sleep.

He could not rest with the like of that creature on the floor above him.

Wizardry. Summonings. Shapings. Unreadable grammaries. Every village had its sorcerous pretender here in Amefel, who by sham and sleight of hand and an occasional — perhaps even credible — cattle-curse or — healing, maintained an Amefin tradition of pot-wizards and generally harmless simples-sellers to which the established Bryalt faith turned a blind eye. Poisonings by such practitioners were generally accidental, the occasional curse or healing was inevitably undocumented, the tin and silver amulets were far too numerously displayed in windows and scratched on sheep-bells to credit for great threat to public decency or the common weal.

But greater magics, Old Kingdom wizardry — the Marhanen had rid the land of that and slammed the lid on that box of terrors once and finally, in the fall of the Sihhë, in the fall of Althalen.

That his own house, the Marhanens, had used Maurylʼs help once to gain the throne — well, that debt of his family lay far in the past, two long generations before his own, as happened, and in the living memory, so far as he knew, only of Mauryl Gestaurien, Emuin, and the Duke of Lanfarnesse, who was stretching the point; besides, in the countryside, a handful of gaffers grown fewer and more incredible as the years rolled by. Wizard…well, yes, Emuin himself could be accounted as such, and of the Old Magic; but Emuin had renounced wizardry and taken the gray robe of holy orders.

And as for Mauryl Gestaurien, arguably the greatest wizard alive, Mauryl had retired from the world to raise cabbages or, gods save them, wayward ghosts, once the old Sihhë hold at Althalen stood in ruins. Ynefel had been for hundreds of years the haunt of owls and mice, nothing more, its dreadful walls a subject of rumor and legend along the border. Mauryl had never come to Amefelʼs court, nor the Kingʼs court in Guelemara, not even to renew his oath to the Marhanen Kings; and one had hardly, except for the Olmern rivermen, spared a thought for the old manʼs doings.

Yet, more worrisome than the amulets and the sheep-bells, the countryfolk of Amefel burned straw men at harvest, reminder of other, bloodier customs; and despite the ban on wizardry in Marhanen lands, the Sihhë star still appeared in fresh paint on rocks out in the Amefin countryside.

And the old silver and copper coinage that bore that mark turned up worn as amulets about Amefin necks despite the threat of the Marhanen Kingʼs law and the ban of Quinalt priests. Such charms the countryfolk sold in open market even here in Henasʼamef, as well as other, more dreadful charms, claimed to be bones of the offered dead.

There might well be, in the remote and folded hills of Amefel, a few places remaining where the Nineteen were worshiped openly: a Guelen patrol not a moon ago had found in the ancient shrine at Anʼs-ford a saucer of something noxious, red, and only slightly dried. Horses and stout ropes had sufficed to pull the old stones apart and scatter them, which would, one hoped, discourage a continued observance at that site, but it had, a reminder how things always stood in Amefel, needed Guelen guardsmen to perform the dismantlement. The Amefin, even those who served to guard the gates at Henasʼamef, had refused to aid in it.

Cefwyn tossed on his bed, cursed the whole benighted province, and wished the visitation instead on Efanor his brother, who sat comfortably in the far more entertaining court in Llymaryn (fatherʼs dearly beloved son, Cefwyn thought bitterly) and who needed not endure this provincial exile, this plagued, wizardous frontier with assassins lurking in the streets and poison likely in the wine.

Wine offered by smiling lords and ladies of the Amefin court at Henasʼamef, of course, who sat across the table from him on state occasions and heartily wished it might be softer-handed Efanor, just Efanor, faraway Efanor, who would inherit the Marhanen throne.

Or wishing they might sup instead with the hostile land of Elwynor across the river, which once, along with Amefel and much of the rest of Ylesuin, had been under Sihhë rule. Nine bleached skulls adorning the Zeideʼs South Gate (which had gained from them a grim new name) and twelve of his own Guelen guardsmen dead preventing them: that was the Elwynim contribution to his peace of mind.

Mauryl Gestaurien had occupied the land between the new and the old and occupied a loyalty between the new and the old — servant, some said, to the first Sihhë lord who had overthrown Galasien; uneasy and absent servant to the Marhanen, who had overthrown the last Sihhë king.

And Mauryl dead — one could only believe, from the young manʼs account — dead. At least immured.

What could kill such a man, in such a dire and unnatural way?

If one believed the youth, who seemed as sincere about his account as he knew how to be, the report that wizardry had overwhelmed Mauryl Gestaurien was more than ominous, and suggestive that the old business at Althalen was perhaps still simmering, and that wizardry which few living men had seen was not simply tales of peasant folk and riddling tutors. Emuin himself, one supposed, as young as a student of Mauryl could possibly be, had seen Althalen fall, and Mauryl had been even then no young man, if he were only the last of his line, and not far, far older, as the peasants claimed — as Emuin hinted sometimes to believe. Mauryl had not been Sihhë himself, but a native of lost Galasien, last of its fabled builders — so rumor said.

Rumor said Mauryl had served the Sihhë from the witchlord Barrakkêth to their fall in the death of Elfwyn — deserting them for crimes only wizards understood.

Wizards like Emuin, who would not speak of it, and who, legend now held, had entered holy orders soon after the dreadful night.

Which was not true. Even he could give the lie to that: Emuin had been quietly active in his art and at court in Guelessar for ten years of his own young life, and had taken to the gray habit and religious retreat only lately…but so readily the Amefin took rumor and legend-making to their hearts that the years between events, most of which had transpired in the very midst of Amefel, mattered nothing to the bards: it fit their expectations, that was all that mattered. If the truth did not fit, why, — cast it out.

As gods knew they would take this truth with no small stir.

Mauryl dead. And this, this vacant-eyed youth come in his place…one could hear the rumors starting. One could hear the gate-guards gossip to their Amefin cohorts, and the lower town guards to the baker and the butcher, and them to the miller and the pigherds, and from there, gods knew, over the fields to the villages, to the hills, to the Elwynim across the river and the Olmern who supplied the old tower with flour, and back again. By the time it had made three trips, Mauryl would have perished in fire and sorceries. Mauryl would have cast himself in stone. Mauryl would have set a curse on the precinct of the tower to entrap any fool who ventured there, Mauryl would have raised cohorts of the dead—

Mauryl would have sent this young man—

For what? For what purpose, in the godsʼ good name, did Mauryl send this innocent-seeming creature, and to him? To him, when all Maurylʼs legendary interventions had been to the ruin of kings Mauryl served?

The candle began to drown and sputter in its own wax, the ceiling to dim at the corners. Cefwyn rolled aside and rescued the flame, tipped the wax out, let the candle flare and the wax puddle and dry on the marble tabletop. He did not trust his reason in the dark, and sleep, as he had foreknown, was entirely eluding him.

In the small, secret shrine contained within the Bryaltine fane, Emuin sat on a low bench, hands locked upon each other, and the sweat stood on his face.

His thoughts strayed persistently from the meditations he attempted and other thoughts crept in like hunting wolves, in a darkness that pressed upon the light of the candles. It was a nook of solid stone, all about it thick stone containing other nooks dedicated to other gods, a place permeated with diverse beliefs. It was isolate, it was silent, it was surrounded by other prayers that should have made him immune to fear or to sorcerous intrusion. He clenched his hands and muttered the ancient ritual aloud, trying to prevent the wit-wandering that was suddenly so dangerous, so permissive of fatal indiscretion.

Mauryl, Mauryl, Mauryl, his thoughts ran, with more grief than he had ever remotely thought he would feel for the old reprobate; and for a moment despite the candles blazing at armʼs length on the altar in front of his face the darkness in the shrine felt almost complete. Such was the distress in his soul.

I am the last of us, he thought, trying to foresee the personal, moral import of Maurylʼs passing; and in doing that, met another realization, inevitably that other name: Hasufin.

The sweat broke and trickled down his temples, and his hand moved to the Teranthine sigil at his breast, silver that — whether chill, whether hot — seemed to burn his hands. He opened his eyes on the candles he had lit and set in a pattern about this private shrine, a pattern itself of obscure significance even in Amefel, whose ancestral roots went deep. There were thirty-eight candles that burned hot and bright, that drowned in light the memory of murder, that drowned in their heavy scent of incensed wax the remembered stink of blood.

But the years ran like water. They trickled through the fingers when a young man shut his fist, and then he was old, and men were knocking at his door at night and showing him a young man whose mere existence told him the extreme, the consummate skill which Mauryl had reached — a knowledge which no wizard before him had attained, not counting Hasufinʼs abomination at Althalen. Mauryl had done this — created this — Summoned this.

Without telling him what he planned. Without asking help.

But did Mauryl Gestaurien ever ask help of him?

Only once.

Damn him! Emuin thought, and caught a breath and smothered his anger in prudent, clammy-handed terror. Even yet, he felt fear of the old manʼs cruel rages. Fear of the old manʼs skill. Fear of the old manʼs deep and mazelike secrecies about his past, his present, his ambitions.

Fear…counting the state of young Tristenʼs wits, or lack of them. Fear of his innocence, his unwise trust. Fear that Mauryl might have fallen short of his ultimate, perhaps killing effort, to Shape this creature, then, and last and cruelly cynical act, passed the flawed gift to him.

Damn him twice.

Mauryl gone from the world. It was thoroughly incredible to him.

It must be done, Mauryl had whispered that night, three generations ago, as men reckoned years. Destroy his body. Trap him where he wanders. Leave him stranded forever. Itʼs our only chance against him.

Gods, how had he listened to Mauryl? How had he broken through the spells that ringed that chamber and that sleeping child, and carrying silvered steel, which should have blasted the hand that wielded it?

I will hold him a time elsewhere, Mauryl had said. Only be swift, — and do not flinch. He is not the child he seems. He is not a child, mark me. Not for nine hundred years. Hasufin is the spiritʼs name. The child died — fourteen years ago. At its birth.

The body had had so much blood, so much blood. He had never imagined that blood would strike the walls, his robe, his face — he had never imagined the feeling of it drying on his skin when for the entire night of fire and murder he was waiting for Mauryl to rescue him from the collapsing wards, an entire night not knowing whether that eldritch soul was indeed banished or loosed within the chamber with him.

Go, get you away, Mauryl had said to him, after. Man of doubts, get you away from this business. Doubt elsewhere. Doubt for those with too much confidence. You will never want for usefulness.

That spirit had, Mauryl swore, gone back to a very ancient grave, dispelled, dispersed — discomfited, but not, it had become very clear, destroyed. Mauryl had taken the tower of lost souls and Sihhë magics, had held the line for decades against that baneful, outraged soul.

It had seemed it would hold forever. That no more would ever be required — of him, at least. Mauryl had not entrusted the dreadful tower to him, nor offered to. Mauryl had not called him to further study. After his obedience, after his survival where all others perished, Mauryl had harshly dismissed him, bidden him live his life in modest quiet afterward and to barrier his soul by whatever means he could.

I shall not call you, Mauryl had said. An end of us. I take no more students. An end of folly, for this generation.

For this generation. For this generation and two more. He had held the truth from two Marhanen kings — and taught their heir…at once more and less than he wished.

Emuin thrust himself to his feet, limping in the aches and stiffness of old age he had, for a dozen heartbeats and in the grip of potent memory, forgotten. He wiped a gnarled hand across his lips, cast his thoughts this way and that from the path his devotions and his conscience directed as his personal salvation.

I cannot manage this, he thought, refusing this new thing as he had tried to refuse new things the night Althalen fell. Mauryl had chided him for his trepidations. Called him coward. And relied on him because Mauryl had no one else fool enough — wizard enough — to attempt that warded chamber while Mauryl fought by less physical means.

And now that Mauryl had attempted this Shaping without advising him and without seeking help from him — now that Mauryl was dead and his work came down to a feckless, hapless youth, at risk and unguarded, — now did Mauryl have the audacity to send the unformed and vulnerable issue of his folly to him to guard?

Where was Emuin the coward in that reckoning? Where was the contemptuous advice to defend his own soul and renounce wizardry in favor of pious self-defense?

Save himself for this moment? Was that Maurylʼs reasoning? Unnoticed, out of the fray, moldering his youth and his time away in self-limiting meditations, preventing himself from what, unchecked, he might have been, losing the years he might have added to his life — all the while waiting for Maurylʼs hour of decision?

And Mauryl never telling him?

He felt for the door and leaned there in the fresher air, slowly taking his breath. There was a pain in his chest that came with passions and exertions. It came more frequently in this last year.

Mortality, he thought. He might well have lived a century longer, might even have reached Maurylʼs fabled years, had he not renounced his arts in favor of — what? A fabled but insubstantial immortality — a priestʼs immortality — which priests could not in concrete terms describe, could not produce, could not remotely prove? His outrage for the waste of his life frightened him. His doubt made mockery of all his deliberate, studied years of abnegation. His doubt raised up anger, and impulse to action, and separated him from all the choices he had ever made.

Still turning away? he could hear Mauryl ask him. Still running, boy?

Still the hand on the latch, boy, and will not open the door?

But all wizardry since that night had held peril for him such as he could not bear. He did not wish to contemplate it, knowing he had bathed himself in blood, betrayed a trust, crossed thresholds each one of which could lead him to darker and angrier magic than he wanted to contemplate — to sorcery and damnation indeed.

His weakness was his own strength. His weakness was his own knowledge. It was fear of both which had led him to the Teranthines — seeking tamer certainties.

And he had found believers who linked their hopes to milder things. Oh, indeed, believers. Unquestioning believers who thought they questioned everything, unhearing believers who heard nothing that in the least degree questioned the tenets of their sacred quest toward a salvation they predetermined to exist. What denied that, — why, shut it out. What threatened that, never was; what threatened that, never had existed. What threatened their confidence had no validity at all for the true and determined believers.

And came this, — Maurylʼs evidence of an access to souls departed, a power the Teranthines denied existed?

Came this, — calling up the nightmare that was Althalen, the ruin of the last of the Old that had flickered on this side of Lenualim, and the death of the one wizardling among Maurylʼs students who might have been the greatest of them…who might, if he had lived, if one could believe the promises that still came whispering in oneʼs dreams, have restored lost Galasien and undone the spells of the Sihhë?

Hasufin would have become, so far as the Teranthines remotely imagined such power, a god.

But for doubt, they — who, through Hasufin, might have inherited the Old Magic — had murdered Maurylʼs old student and stranded him in a second death: at least that was the belief Mauryl had urged upon them. A second death — because Hasufin was not the fair, soft-spoken child he seemed to be, a mere fourteen years in the world, and was by no means the Sihhë kingʼs young brother. They had died, all the wizards at Althalen, all but himself and Mauryl, in that desperate assault on Hasufinʼs wizardry, while the Marhanens ran through the halls with fire and sword. The wizards had all perished, except himself, except Mauryl, who had parted from him thereafter and called him coward.

Him—coward. He still trembled with the indignity of it.

Ask — what this Shaping was. Ask about its innocence, this wayfarer with Maurylʼs stamp and Maurylʼs seal all over him — in a book on which he felt Maurylʼs touch.

He felt a clammy chill despite the heat of the candles. He turned from the door and fought down the smothering panic that urged him to flee all involvement, panic that urged him to seek retreat at the shrine at Anwyfar among the pious, the modest Teranthines, and to take refuge in the semblance, at least, of godly and human prayers.

Why? the essential question pressed upon him. Because Mauryl knew he was dying?

Because somehow, by some means, what they had trapped and banished had found a Place to enter again that they who bound him had not thought of?

Temptation offered itself: there were ways to find those answers. He could even yet set himself mind-journeying; that art did not leave a wizard, once practiced. It seemed reasonable, even sanely necessary, to look however briefly at Ynefel, where none of Cefwynʼs patrols dared go, to confirm or deny human agency in this…apparent wakening of an old, old threat.

It was appallingly easy to make that slight departure, that drifting apart from here…they had gone far beyond illusioning, the brotherhood at old Althalen. He had not been the least of Maurylʼs students, only — for a time, only for a time, evidently, after that dread and bloody night — the last.

Out and out he went faring, through gray-white space.

And drew back again, shivering, an impression of blinding light yet lingering in his mind, a glimpse of something too well remembered — too tempting — that final reach for power, first, to govern those who had no power, and then to contend with each other for more power, the greater against the lesser, for the ambition of gods…

He carried the Teranthine circle to his lips, clasped it in his two hands, warming it with his breath, attempting again the peace of meditation. His mind was too powerful for easy diversion into ritual inanity, endless repetition of prayers. That was the reason he had sought the once-obscure Teranthines — not a confidence in their pantheon, which was in major points of belief the same as the Quinaltʼs — but rather interest in the intricate, interwoven and demanding patterns of their approach to meditation, which sought, in their most convolute supplications, all gods, lest any be neglected.

For one who did not, in any case, believe in the new gods the Guelenfolk had brought to the land, it had been very attractive. For one who did not wholly desert the gods of his youth and his art — it had given comfort and stability in a world he perceived as entirely conditional.

Now, considering what he knew and what he feared of Maurylʼs workings, he found his meditations at once terrifying — and liberating, to wizardly powers the Teranthines did not remotely guess.

He had continually, in his devotions, approached the Old, the Nineteen, seeking answers to questions which would have horrified even the all-forgiving Teranthines: it was in consideration of their sensibilities that he had never explained to them that the Sihhë icon for which he had asked — and bought — their secret indulgence, for its presence in a Bryaltine shrine…was not mere honor to an ideal. That this particular form of the Sihhë star was older than the Sihhë, who had needed no gods — he had not mentioned that. He never murmured Old names aloud in his devotions. He applied himself to intricate and many-sided rituals the origin of which the eastern-born Teranthines, jackdaws of all religion, had themselves appropriated from the western-bred Amefin. Sometimes he provided them innovations of meditative practice that were not innovation at all, with methodology and exercises of focus that, from his writings, slipped into orthodox Teranthine practice across all Ylesuin. The Bryaltines were exclusively Amefin, heretic to the Quinalt eye, and practiced dangerous meditations and collected gods like talismans because they feared to lose anything. The Teranthines, meditative and truly less interested in proselytizing, gave him respectability in the royal court and a comfortable life: they had the Marhanensʼ patronage, and they let an intelligent man think. He had respect within the Brotherhood: the Teranthine ritual constantly evolved and grew, now with scattered pieces of Galasite belief set into it — his own.

He should, he thought, feel profoundly guilty for those inclusions, for the Teranthines were innocents born of the new age and he was not; but he had until now found his appropriations from the Galasite practices small matters, nostalgic for him, and unlikely to do the Order harm or bring it into conflict with the Quinalt — he was very circumspect, and argued with a juristʼs knowledge of the Quinaltine belief. And indeed, he had cherished his small deviations as the last connection of the world with the Old, to bequeath something of their practice to safeguard the new, a silent and precautionary gift, like this shrine, that his donative had established in the face of changes and persecutions. The candles here never ceased, through all the years, day or night, in his absence. It kept the light of wizardry burning — literally — in this ancient land: it strengthened by its little degree the wards and barriers wizardry had never abandoned, not through all the Sihhë reign, not through the Marhanen ascendancy: and the age of those reigns together was, almost precisely, a thousand years.

His gnarled hands clenched. So easy it was, if he willed, to fall into the old thoughts, the way of wizardly power so easy to a man once practiced. Hasufin had been very old, very evil, Maurylʼs student once in Galasien, who had aimed at power nine centuries ago and come back from the grave to have it: it was still necessary to believe what Mauryl had told them, and not that they, in the circle of Maurylʼs disciples, might conceivably have destroyed a wizard who could have restored the art to its former, enlightened glory — and given all the world to them.

Refraining from power is, he thought, gazing at the eight-pointed star shining on the altar shelf, the sole virtue I have achieved in all these years. Mauryl would not have lied to us. I believe that. But…

Doubting is my sole defense, the only effective barrier against the unequivocal dark. I am all grays.

And the safest, wisest thing to do now is to go into retreat at Anwyfar and to have nothing to do, for good or for ill, with this thing of Maurylʼs.

I shall die soon, — soon, at least, as men reckon years. I have seen to my own soul. I need not risk it in Maurylʼs service. I need not fling myself into Maurylʼs designs, against Maurylʼs enemy, ancient — unknowable to my age.

How dare he? How dare he do this to me?

Then he thought of his own students, of Cefwyn and others that were young, without understanding of the deeds he had done, without defense against the enemy Mauryl had himself fostered, and against whom once before Mauryl had enlisted his unthanked help; and in that thought he clenched his hands and wept for sheer pent-up rage.

The servant passed from sconce to sconce, touching a waxed straw to a new set of candles, others, half-consumed and long-unused when they had arrived at the room, having been taken from their sockets and replaced.

Which Tristen thought profligate, and entirely unneeded.

There was a large table at one side of this room, nearest the fire, which he thought was a table for food and for study. Beyond a slight sort of archway was the bed, where, if he were at home, he would have gone and simply flung himself down with or without the sheets, daring even Maurylʼs displeasure.

But he feared now even to move without the leave of Idrys, who waited, armed and grimly patient, in a hard chair near the door.

It seemed forever that the servants had worked — the room would have done very well for him, dusty as it was. Ynefel had been dusty. He would not have cared for dust on the tables or even on the bedclothes, as he would not have cared that the candles were old and half-burned. There was dark behind the unshuttered windows, long since, and the knowledge that a bed awaited him — with servants arranging new sheets, new comforters — made him nod toward sleep even sitting and trying to be on his best manners.

They had laid a small fire in the hearth, they said, to burn freshening evergreen and to take the mustiness away. If there had been any, it must have long since done that. They fussed over candles that were perfectly good. Before that, they had kept him waiting in the hall an unendurable time, arranging this and that, bringing in stacks of linen. Now he sat by the fireside warming the shivers and the aches of travel from his bones and growing sleepier and sleepier as they found still more things to dust and polish.

But, oh, at last, now, the servants looked to be finishing their business and looked to be leaving. With eyes that burned with exhaustion and a hope that like the rest of him trembled with repeated demands, he watched them all gather by the door as if they were about to leave.

He hoped that Idrys would go, too, but he did not.

And servants left, but at the same time more servants came in bearing a huge brass tub, which — an interminable wait — they set in a corner behind a screen, and filled, with successive pails of steaming water. Then they told him they would help him with his bath.

“I can bathe, sirs,” he said to them. He would bear with anything they wished, only to get to bed, but he had had enough of strangers laying hands on him, and he was bruised and sore.

“Do as they ask,” Idrys said darkly, Idrys seeming weary himself and out of patience. So he did as they wished, stripped off his filthy clothing and settled into the bath — wonderfully warm water which smelled strongly of pleasant herbs. He bent and ducked even his head. Offered pungent soap, he washed his hair and scrubbed the lines of dirt from his hands and everywhere above and below the water.

Idrys came and stood over the tub, hands on hips. “Wash well. There are doubtless vermin.”

“Yes, sir,” Tristen said, taking it, on reflection, for some sort of a peacemaking, and a very reasonable request from Idrys. He scrubbed until his skin turned red, the cloudy water turned brown, and he felt himself at last entirely clean and acceptable.

Idrys walked away, apparently satisfied — while Tristen almost lacked the strength afterward to rise from the tub. But with two servantsʼ unanticipated help he managed it, and wrapped gratefully in the sheet they offered, shaking from head to foot in the cold air, but, oh, so much relieved.

He sat where they wished then, and they toweled his hair, during which he nearly slipped from the bench asleep.

“Here,” said Idrys, pushing at him to make him lift his head, as the door opened and yet more servants came in, and one pattered closer. He saw food offered him, he put out a hand and took a wedge of cheese as from the other side a second servant offered him a cup both pungent and sweet. It seemed when he tasted it much finer than the ale Mauryl had given him sparingly. He drank, and ate a mouthful of the cheese, and tears began to flow down his face, reasonless and vain. He wiped at them with the back of the hand that held the cheese, gulped the wine down, because he was thirsty.

Then his fingers went numb, so that he could hardly hold the cup from falling.

Idrys caught it before it hit the floor, the servants caught him before he did — but he was still aware as they carried him to a soft, silky and very cold bed.

Then he slept, truly slept, for the first time since his own bed in Ynefel.